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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<\/a> 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<\/a>. It means, too, that her fandom is all over the place, separated into factions claiming rich, soul-deep connections to particular Lorde eras<\/a> while remaining entirely detached from others<\/a>. Tonight, at London\u2019s O2 Arena, teens and middle-aged gay men scream and bop and heckle to the cosmic euphoria of Melodrama cuts \u201cGreen Light\u201d and \u201cPerfect Places\u201d (\u201cWhip it out!\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n Lorde\u2019s 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 \u2013 a person googles where \u201cTeam\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n There are glimmers of Kanye West\u2019s Yeezus tour to the staging here, with its blocky light rigs and lasers. Lorde interacts with objects that are static and brutalist \u2013 an industrial fan is wheeled out for her to paw at; she runs on a treadmill to the pulsating synth-pop of \u201cSupercut\u201d. Two dancers, dressed in looks that are giving streetwear-by-Muji, cavort around her inelegantly, as if they\u2019ve been told to just wander on stage and do whatever they like.<\/p>\n Lorde herself is sweet, earnest and lightly cringe. \u201cAre you ready to get f****d up?\u201d she whispers, Kiwily, early on. \u201cI wrote this song in the shower,\u201d she says of the post-coital bop \u201cGRWM\u201d, \u201cso I have to sing it wet\u201d. 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\u2019m-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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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\u2019s enough space in her material for you to project. For me, the highlight of tonight\u2019s show is the jangling, sun-kissed Solar Power cut \u201cOceanic Feeling\u201d, which Lorde sings while lying on the ground, a smile on her face. It\u2019s 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\u2019m 34 now, so duh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-267946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}