Lorde has been trying to make sense of the gawky phases of girlhood since her 2013 debut Pure Heroine and while more stars open their therapy sessions to the public, the New Zealand alt-pop diva makes unpicking adolescence far less embarrassing.
A single blue laser sweeps the 21,000-capacity AO Arena before settling on the singer performing Hammer, barefoot in baggy jeans that hang from her hips. There’s a slinky, strung-out downtown New York theatre trope slipping through the set showcasing her latest release Virgin; subtle nods to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense pile up as each song brings a new prop and body to clamber across tabletops in euphoric abandon.
Drum machines drop into Royals, then cameras zoom in on analogue synths tangled in patch cables for Broken Glass. Behind Ella Yelich-O’Connor, screens flicker in a fast-paced blur of electric blue, her projection shattered into pixelated 8-bit dots like a Windows screensaver. “You tasted my underwear, I knew we were fucked,” she confides in Current Affairs, stripping down to her grey Calvin Klein boxers.
Everything about the current Ultrasound tour is viscerally kinetic, as if someone pressed fast-forward on an early-2000s DVD. One moment, she sprawls on the raised stage, kicking her legs like a teenage girl in bed, the next, she paces on a treadmill, crying into the bouncy ballad Supercut. There’s an emphasis on the body: dancers clasp handheld cameras, filming her midriff wired to the screens, sweat beading under the lights. The lens twists, holding the contours of Lorde’s body in a small reclamation of self. “I’m a little starstruck by you, Manchester,” she shouts.
Clearblue stuns. She grips a vocoder to her chest Imogen Heap-style, her duct-tape bra catching the strobes as she performs intimately to an adoring crowd. At the end of the night, an outfit change sees Lorde walk through fans in a luminous bike-reflector jacket, holding on to a member of the audience as he sings David. The live feed glitches between her soft face and a pre-recorded image, a digital echo of tonight’s performance and her past. Lorde truly captures intimacy and nostalgia like no other.
• Lorde plays the O2, London, 16-17 November, then tours
