The crowd at All Points East is so young, many won’t remember when Lorde first burst onto the scene, singing about driving Cadillacs in her dreams. But for those of us old enough to have had an iPod, the sound of the Kiwi teen is baked into our adolescence.
Lorde wrote her first hit, “Royals”, in 2012 when she was just 15. The song went on to spend nine weeks at the top of the charts and won two Grammy awards in 2014. Aged just 17, she became the youngest artist ever to win Song of the Year. Since then, the 29-year-old songwriter hasn’t achieved the same level of mainstream success, despite producing four critically acclaimed albums.
When Lorde appears in Victoria Park, she’s standing by a synthesizer dressed in a black, PVC tracksuit. Her familiar curls are slicked back, her face is bare and her expression is alarmingly intense. Behind her, pulsing electrical heart signals are projected onto an LED screen. You can feel the ripple of excitement. She’s about to perform like her life depends on it.
She opens with “Royals” – unawkward about its stratospheric success – but dials up its edgy, masculine energy so it feels more like a defiant, brooding protest song than the familiar pop tune. Then she pivots into “What Was That”, a spikey, sinewy number from her latest record, Virgin, that whips up the crowd even more than her oldest hit.
The set is full of hard edges: techno rave meets Parkour route. Lorde, who prowls around like a panther, gyrates on her hands and knees, clambers up ladders and over blocks topped with Perspex. She films herself from below, pushing her face against the clear plastic, giving us a distorted, unflattering close up.The performance is unapologetically challenging, but when she offers a flash of vulnerability, it leaves us gasping for breath. As Lorde sings “Liability” – a tender piano ballad about being too much to handle – videos of her teenage self are projected onto her torso. She looks teary and raw and we’re right there with her.
It’s that mixture of hard, propulsive energy and soft, emotional underbelly that makes this performance a reflection of an artist at the absolute top of her game. Lorde didn’t just raise the bar; she did a few chin ups for good measure. As she sings “Man of the Year” – an industrial anthem – she seems to sum it up with the lyric, “I’ve become someone else / Someone more like myself.” Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor (her real name, who knew?) has achieved peak Lordeness.
[Further reading: Phoebe Bridgers has lost the plot]
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