Lorde review, O2 Arena London – Energy, cringe and restless teens pining for Melodrama tracks

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.

There are glimmers of Kanye West’s Yeezus tour to the staging here, with its blocky light rigs and lasers. Lorde interacts with objects that are static and brutalist – an industrial fan is wheeled out for her to paw at; she runs on a treadmill to the pulsating synth-pop of “Supercut”. Two dancers, dressed in looks that are giving streetwear-by-Muji, cavort around her inelegantly, as if they’ve been told to just wander on stage and do whatever they like.

Lorde herself is sweet, earnest and lightly cringe. “Are you ready to get f****d up?” she whispers, Kiwily, early on. “I wrote this song in the shower,” she says of the post-coital bop “GRWM”, “so I have to sing it wet”. A dancer proceeds to pour water over her and film her belly-button, footage of which is projected onto a big screen behind her. Lorde, aged 29 but personal timeline all over the shop, seems to be in her MDMA-popping, yes-I’m-having-sex college years at the moment. The crowd goes wild, maybe because a ton of them are there, too, or at least nostalgic for when they were.

That’s always been the magic of Lorde, though. Her music is intimate and worldly and laser-focused on the specifics of her life, but also oddly open. There’s enough space in her material for you to project. For me, the highlight of tonight’s show is the jangling, sun-kissed Solar Power cut “Oceanic Feeling”, which Lorde sings while lying on the ground, a smile on her face. It’s a track about pondering the future, thinking about your father, imagining your children, and recognising that, actually, you had nothing to be fearful of. The kids around me yawn. I cry. But I’m 34 now, so duh.