Most pop stars are, entirely reasonably, done with proximity to fans and their bad behaviour. Billie Eilish would be within her rights to never do a barrier walk again after being violently grabbed in Miami last month. Ariana Grande was also jumped on by a fan on the red carpet last week.
So it was with an astounding amount of trust that Lorde put on a light-up jacket and descended from the stage of The O2 in London at the end of her Ultrasound Tour set and walked slowly and calmly through the crowd performing David from her latest album Virgin. “I don’t belong to anyone,” she sang to her camera operator, before climbing up a podium to get the whole crowd dancing to an encore of A World Alone and Ribs from her first album Pure Heroine.
In turn, the audience behaved impeccably; no rushing or grabbing, just hands reached beseechingly towards Lorde as though she were a saint. When someone in the crowd needed emergency assistance during Clearblue, bystanders raised their phone torches to signal for help and Lorde amplified their request, calmly improvising with her vocoder while they were rescued.
This assured mastery of 18,000 people is all the more impressive given the 29-year-old performer born Ella Yelich-O’Connor has suffered from crippling stage fright since she became wildly famous at 16. The experimental MDMA and psilocybin treatment she received from 2022 to 2024 must really have worked.
You would never know she had ever felt fear in her life as she threw herself around the stage with abandon. She stripped down to grey CK boxers before getting doused in water from her internet-famous £130 rainbow water bottle, climbed to the top of a sound system and lit a flare, bared her torso with just duct-tape on her chest.
Charli xcx officially passed her crown to her doppelgänger following their Girl, So Confusing remix, and Lorde has run with the in-your-face camerawork popularised by Brat. All this carefully choregraphed messiness is projected through different angles onto the screen behind the bare stage, each song shot and lit differently as though Lorde and her team are creating a series of Happenings-esque music videos on the fly.
The medical imaging motif of Virgin came alive with blue lasers pulsing through dry ice, alternately bisecting and surrounding Lorde as she exposed herself. A giant lighting rig encircled her while a pixel simulacra of the singer appeared like the ghost in a machine behind her. Tracks from her 2017 album, Melodrama mixed in seamlessly; for Supercut she lay on her side singing to a camera like a lover, before running on a treadmill captured from all angles.
There are some glitches. Her divisive pandemic album, Solar Power, is harder to integrate with the rest of her body of work. Lorde chose to sing just one track, Oceanic Feeling, kneeling on stage as the crowd lit up with phone torches (the health and safety approved alternative to getting your lighter out these days). Some of the intense close-ups on her flat stomach veered towards body checking — Lorde has spoken frankly on her Virgin press tour about developing an eating disorder.
The artist paid special attention to the London of it all. It was the city she retreated to when everything fell apart following the breakdown of her relationship with Justin Warren in 2023. “I had to let it all break down and I came here to London and I totally fell apart,” she told the crowd. Bouncing around friends’ spare rooms and swimming in the Hampstead Ladies Pond helped her “figure out a way to bring it all forward”.
Every artist is breaking and reconstituting themselves in some way. With Ultrasound Lorde has found intimacy and connection in the raw and revealed, the soundwaves that can visualise an image of our bodies’ secret insides without spilling guts.
From performing at Madame Jojo’s in 2013, Brixton Academy the following year, up to Ally Pally 2022 and now the London O2, Lorde’s power to draw a crowd keeps growing. After that performance, I have full confidence she could make a stadium tour feel as intimate as singing together in the shower.
Lorde is playing at All Points East on 22 August 2026, tickets and information here.
Setlist for Ultrasound Tour on 17 November
Hammer
Royals
Broken Glass
Buzzcut Season
Favourite Daughter
Perfect Places
Shapeshifter
Current Affairs
Supercut
GRWM
400 Lux
The Louvre
Oceanic Feeling
Big Star
Liability
Clearblue
Man of the Year
If She Could See Me Now
Team
What Was That
Green Light
David
Ribs
