Returning to \u014ctautahi for the first time since she headlined Electric Avenue in 2023, Lorde\u2019s 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 \u2018Shapeshifter\u2019, glitching out in \u2018Perfect Places\u2019, inverting colours like an old Macbook Photobooth setting on the staggering video screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image: Alex Casey<\/p>\n
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 \u2018Supercut\u2019. My only wish from this sweaty millennial is that the Gen Zs around us dared to move their bodies even a fraction as much.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGuys I am fucking thirsty,\u201d Lorde said at one point, holding up the iridescent rainbow water bottle that has become a talisman of her current era. \u201cAre you star struck?\u201d Other symbols of Virgin were peppered throughout in her bare duct taped chest for the bravado-filled \u2018Man of the Year\u2019, 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 \u2018If She Could See Me Now\u2019 harking back to the goth teen days of \u2018Tennis Court\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u2018Royals\u2019 in 2013. \u201cI 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.\u201d The feeling of reciprocity was particularly potent when the house lights came up for \u2018Perfect Places\u2019, the camera turning to an ecstatic crowd screaming \u201cwhat the fuck are perfect places, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n
Image: Alex Casey<\/p>\n
But that was just one transcendent moment among many, many transcendent moments. Ahead of Valentine\u2019s Day today, Lorde announced herself as the \u201cpatron saint of crushes\u201d and climbed the speaker stack to the \u2018The Louvre\u2019. 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\u2019s guess which would make my heart explode first. \u2018Favourite Daughter\u2019 was another crusher, leaving many sobbing over their mums under cerulean blue lights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After the euphoric closing sequence of \u2018Team\u2019 (lit with the colours of the Palestinian flag), \u2018What Was That\u2019 and \u2018Green Light\u2019, we were all soaked in sweat and collapsing in each other\u2019s arms. Lorde ended the show by walking through the crowd for \u2018David\u2019, her LED jacket a beacon of warm light in the dark. She stopped right next to us plebs and sang: \u201cI made you God \u2019cause it was all \/ That I knew how to do.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For her final miracle, she popped upon a tiny stage at the back of the arena and ripped through bone deep fan favourite \u2018Ribs\u2019 as the encore, at which point I turned to my friend, slack-jawed, and said \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve seen God.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOr Lorde, even,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seeing Lorde is to feel like you\u2019ve seen God, Alex Casey finds as she joins the Wolfbrook Arena,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4487,3681,492,156,1063,32586,158358,111,139,69,1066,158359,158360,49227],"class_list":["post-283822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-christchurch","tag-cnz-review","tag-comments-enabled","tag-entertainment","tag-live-music","tag-lorde","tag-melodrama","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pop-culture","tag-pure-heroine","tag-ultrasound-tour","tag-virgin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}