‘I wrote this song in the shower,’ New Zealand pop star Lorde says to her audience, anodised titanium waterbottle in hand. It’s one of several windows into her personal life in the Ultrasound World Tour. Three years on from her last visit to Australia, her new show pulls away from the blistering glow of Solar Power and inwards towards a spiritual rebirth.
This tour has been designed to put forward a more intimate side of the star. For almost two hours, she was simply Ella Yelich-O’Connor, a girl from the suburbs of Tāmaki Makaurau in Aotearoa (Auckland in New Zealand). Over an hour and forty-five minutes, she presented the story of her latest album, Virgin, across a bare stage, with help from only two dancers and a small band.
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Taking a personal story to an arena tour
Ultrasound marks Lorde’s first arena tour of this scale. It’s a bold leap after a run of intimate theatre shows that accompanied her previous album, Solar Power, and it’s a risk that’s paid off – with over 50 sold out dates, she gave Virgin the vast and overwhelming stage its music demands.
Lorde thrives in the expanded space, pushing herself to reach every corner of the arena. It was the opportunity for her to stretch her voice and presence outwards in a way that mirrors the emotional expansiveness of Virgin.
Even through all the noise and light, Lorde still knows when to step back into intimacy. Midway through her set at Qudos Bank Arena, she sat barefoot on stage, speaking earnestly of her love for Sydney. The cheers that followed are proof that the love runs both ways.
Stripped back to basics
The show progressed from the thunderous wallop of Hammer to the familiar and popular kick drum of Grammy winning song Royals. The standout performances were those from her latest album – they were an opportunity for her to strip down to her rawest self, metaphorically and physically.
For Current Affairs and GRWM, she removed her jeans and let a dancer douse her underwear in water. During If She Could See Me Now, she jumped across the stage, harmonising with a backing track of herself. It’s a set that feels intimate despite its scale because of the way Lorde presents herself – curled at the end of a catwalk completely stripped of all glamour. There are no sequinned bodysuits and sparkly microphones, just lights, synths, jeans and bare feet.
This translates across the entire set, from Supercut, where she begins to jog barefoot on a treadmill, to Man Of The Year, where she tapes her chest flat with silver duct tape before pushing through a burst of confetti and light.
Bringing the crowd in
Her fans joined in, many donning her signature ‘talismans’ of the Virgin era: duct-taped chests and boots, phoenix pins, shoelace belts, custom cyanotype tees and bleach painted denim shorts. One girl wore duct tape across her bare chest, like Lorde in her Man Of The Year music video, in a fascinating yet painful level of commitment.
Silence was rare – tracks were extended, remixed and reimagined to better fit into one another. The Louvre had a longer outro while Oceanic Feeling introduced darker, deeper and grittier synths to help it fit thematically within the aesthetic and sound of Ultrasound. When brief moments between songs cut all sound and light, the space was immediately filled by a roaring audience.
Lorde had the difficult task of satisfying a crowd with three years of building expectations but from the first synth in Hammer to her last bow in Ribs, she succeeded.
In songs, on T-shirts and in interviews, Lorde framed her latest album as a mystical rebirth. It’s a quality that pulses through her Australian Ultrasound shows. Night after night, slick and sticky with sweat, she discards her jeans and launches into a feral, transcendent dance of pure passion and femininity. That’s about as mystical as a person can get – and, in Lorde’s world, it reads as just another Wednesday night in the public eye.
The Australian leg of Lorde’s Ultrasound World Tour concludes on 25 February.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
