If you become a preternaturally wise pop phenomenon at the age of 16, an angsty club-hopper at 20 and a New Agey melancholic at 24, then live out your messy, Brooklyn-warehouse-party Hannah Horvath fantasy at 29, your personal timeline will inevitably be a little disjointed. The work, life and sonic trajectory of the New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde has been a jumble, zig-zagging between self-reflective, seen-it-all gloom and a primal, perma-adolescent urge to freak out and dance. It means, too, that her fandom is all over the place, separated into factions claiming rich, soul-deep connections to particular Lorde eras while remaining entirely detached from others. Tonight, at London’s O2 Arena, teens and middle-aged gay men scream and bop and heckle to the cosmic euphoria of Melodrama cuts “Green Light” and “Perfect Places” (“Whip it out!”, I hear from behind me as Lorde strips to her CKs). During woozy downtempos, namely a handful of tracks from her divisive 2021 record Solar Power, everyone seems to head to the bar.
Lorde’s Ultrasound tour, then, is not a freight train of a show that chugs along on sheer spitfire. Energy spikes and then plummets again. People leap to their feet and then, two or three songs later, return to their seats looking a little restless. Phones are pulled up – a person googles where “Team”, a particularly tweenage bit of suburban angst Lorde wrote aged 15, will arrive in the setlist. Still, Lorde herself seems engaged and ecstatic, hopping across the stage, gripping at her chest, shimmying. She is gangly and uncoordinated, as if at the tail-end of a night out.
