Seeing Lorde is to feel like you’ve seen God, Alex Casey finds as she joins the Wolfbrook Arena, Ōtautahi stop of Lorde’s Ultrasound tour.
It was the most assured down trou I have ever seen. When the whole of Wolfbrook Arena flushed red for ‘Current Affairs’, a three-minute song more illicit and erotically-charged than anything ‘Wuthering Heights’ could muster in two hours, Lorde dropped her baggy men’s jeans to reveal a sweat-soaked pair of blood red Calvins. Song after song, she continued to peel off layer after layer, determined to remove all obstacles between her and the audience and reach the kind of total transparency of Virgin’s infamous x-ray album cover.
Returning to Ōtautahi for the first time since she headlined Electric Avenue in 2023, Lorde’s Ultrasound tour was the polar opposite of the sun-soaked Solar Power set, a sublime techno-frenzy of dancing, lasers, monolithic speaker stacks and screens inside screens inside screens. The barefoot woman who once threw her cellular device in the water has now firmly embraced the mechanics of the modern world, becoming a buzzy warped visualiser for ‘Shapeshifter’, glitching out in ‘Perfect Places’, inverting colours like an old Macbook Photobooth setting on the staggering video screen.
While being steeped in layer upon layer of technology, the Ultrasound show was also firmly grounded in the body and movement. The harsh industrial stage set up became a playground for her small team of dancers, who swung off the lighting rigs like they were monkey bars and scaled the speakers like a jungle gym. Other times, the set became an actual gym as Lorde jumped on the treadmill to sprint her way through the elliptical memory montage of ‘Supercut’. My only wish from this sweaty millennial is that the Gen Zs around us dared to move their bodies even a fraction as much.
“Guys I am fucking thirsty,” Lorde said at one point, holding up the iridescent rainbow water bottle that has become a talisman of her current era. “Are you star struck?” Other symbols of Virgin were peppered throughout in her bare duct taped chest for the bravado-filled ‘Man of the Year’, or the constant beams of blue and white laser light which seemed powerful enough to x-ray all 10,000 of us. It felt like she had brought some old friends too, with the black fishnet shrug she wore during ‘If She Could See Me Now’ harking back to the goth teen days of ‘Tennis Court’.
In front of a diverse crowd of little girls and their parents, Gen Zs in matching shorts and sequin tops, and random guys occasionally watching rugby on their phone (Christchurch!), Lorde thanked everyone for embracing every version of her since ‘Royals’ in 2013. “I cannot tell you how lucky I feel that you have loved me right through all my stages, and that these songs are our songs now.” The feeling of reciprocity was particularly potent when the house lights came up for ‘Perfect Places’, the camera turning to an ecstatic crowd screaming “what the fuck are perfect places, anyway?”
But that was just one transcendent moment among many, many transcendent moments. Ahead of Valentine’s Day today, Lorde announced herself as the “patron saint of crushes” and climbed the speaker stack to the ‘The Louvre’. As that soaring, sad guitar closed out the song, she held up a single flare in the darkness, the reverb going so hard and the emotions running so high that it was anyone’s guess which would make my heart explode first. ‘Favourite Daughter’ was another crusher, leaving many sobbing over their mums under cerulean blue lights.
After the euphoric closing sequence of ‘Team’ (lit with the colours of the Palestinian flag), ‘What Was That’ and ‘Green Light’, we were all soaked in sweat and collapsing in each other’s arms. Lorde ended the show by walking through the crowd for ‘David’, her LED jacket a beacon of warm light in the dark. She stopped right next to us plebs and sang: “I made you God ’cause it was all / That I knew how to do.” A dark sermon, but the final fitting religious allusion on a night that genuinely felt as close to the divine as the modern hellworld gets.
For her final miracle, she popped upon a tiny stage at the back of the arena and ripped through bone deep fan favourite ‘Ribs’ as the encore, at which point I turned to my friend, slack-jawed, and said “I feel like I’ve seen God.”
“Or Lorde, even,” she replied.
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