Lorde
Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, NSW
Wednesday, February 18th
“It’s my job to dig really deep inside and excavate all the secrets in my soul,” Lorde, aka 29-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor, tells a sold-out crowd of over 16,000 fans at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena. “Sometimes I wonder is it too much, but you guys take it and run with it.”
Since her 2013 debut album Pure Heroine, released when she was 16, Lorde has struck a chord with audiences thanks to a winning blend of emotional vulnerability and thumping electronic pop, both of which are blown up to arena-sized proportions tonight.
That vulnerability and compulsion to excavate and expose reached new heights on last year’s fourth album Virgin, from its pelvis X-ray cover art to frank lyrics about pregnancy scares, gender fluidity and eating disorders.
The latter is discussed on the deceptively upbeat “Broken Glass”, which sees Lorde remove her belt, drawing wild screams from the mostly young female crowd. It’s the first major hint of how much Lorde uses her body as an extension of her art tonight, harnessing it as another part of her to expose – whether that’s sliding off her jeans and singing in her underwear during “Current Affairs”, or taking off a top to reveal gaffer-taped breasts during an epic “Man of the Year”.
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Lorde’s bass-and-beats-heavy music has always had an inherent physicality to it — tracks like “Team” and “What Was That” rattle your back teeth and dare you not to dance — and it’s a thrill to see Lorde throw her whole body and soul into the performance. During “GRWN”, she pours water on herself (she wrote the song while wet in the shower, she tells us) while allowing a dancer to film her up close and personal on a camcorder as she moves to the music; at points during the superb “Supercut”, she jogs on a treadmill (all while singing perfectly, mind).
A breather, for both Lorde and the crowd, comes in the form of the quiet and pretty “Oceanic Feeling” from 2021’s divisive Solar Power. The fact that the song and the following title track go down a treat with the audience plays like a mini redemption arc for an LP whose tracks sound like a breezy, blissed-out necessity in an otherwise high-energy set.
Still, high-energy is perhaps the zone in which Lorde operates best, and it doesn’t get better or energetic than a euphoric version of “Green Light” that makes a solid case for it being the best song in Lorde’s impressive discography. Earlier, Lorde put into words the mutual love between her and the Sydney fans who’ve seen her go from small clubs to arenas, and that love is joyously generated and felt rather than being simply spoken about during the song’s epic three minutes and 54 seconds.
By the time the final song “Ribs” arrives, with Lorde standing atop a small platform in the middle of the arena surrounded by adoring fans with their arms outstretched, she has given us everything, an artist who has lived and breathed their art tonight for all to share in. Judging by the spectacular show we’ve just witnessed, if this is Lorde’s version of too much, you can only hope she remains this generous of an artist forever.
Check out Lorde’s remaining Australian tour dates here.
