What is more revealing than nudity? The cover of Lorde’s most recent album Virgin: an X-ray of the New Zealand singer’s pelvis, complete with belt buckle, jeans zip and an IUD. Her latest tour – called Ultrasound, in a continuation of the theme – finds yet more novel and satisfying ways of taking Lorde’s insides outside.
Ultrasound is probably one of the most arresting arena-pop spectacles of the year, simply because there is so little to it. The dark, stripped-back stage is bare except for some chunky props: a fan, a monolithic speaker cabinet and, later, a treadmill. When Lorde runs on the machine for Supercut, a track from her acclaimed 2017 album Melodrama, it implies speed. But it also signals the constant, Sisyphean effort put into people-pleasing explored on that track (“In my head, I do everything right”) as well as on some of Lorde’s more tender recent work (“Look at the medals I won for ya,” she sings on Favourite Daughter).
Two token dun-clad dancers, meanwhile, are deliberately unobtrusive – just some bendy people hanging out, mostly on the floor. Cameras stalk Lorde’s every move; for GRWM (AKA “grown woman”), the screens are filled with sweaty closeups of that abdomen. Like a cat exposing its softest parts, it seems she trusts us.
On her first UK arena tour, Lorde eschews every expectation, bar the confetti cannons and her walk through the crowd to the B-stage in finger-brushing distance of fans. (To my mind, that walk wastes the song she sings, Virgin’s gut-puncher of a closing track, David). Lorde doesn’t fly, unleash pyrotechnics or execute any complex costume changes. She just wears clothes. Or not.
Starting in a T-shirt and ripped jeans, she strips to some grey men’s boxers, then ends up topless in a bra made of gaffer tape, eventually unceremoniously putting garments back on, as if she had just woken up at your house. All is casual and greyscale – a refreshing contrast to the fantastical stagings of Lady Gaga and Chappell Roan. The most colourful thing here is Lorde’s rainbow-effect titanium water bottle, a grounding talisman “that has become more famous than me”, she jokes.
Neither tour nor album is interested in fuss or fripperies; the sound and lighting is minimal, privileging stark digitals and juddering bass. Singers are always making their “most personal work yet”; it’s one of the oldest sells in the playbook. Time will tell whether this is true of Virgin, but it certainly projects candour and vulnerability. The album’s title seems to nod towards a biblical, clean-slate rebirth. But Lorde has another view of the term “virgin”, one that draws from Latin or Greek etymologies about not being attached to a man, hinting at non-binary or independent roots.
All is casual and greyscale – the most colourful thing here is her rainbow-effect water bottle, a grounding talisman
This is an album, and a show, in which Lorde thinks about femaleness and the body while questioning gender tropes. On Clearblue, about a pregnancy test, her a cappella, effects-laden vocals recall Bon Iver’s digital period, and the use of pitch-shift and Auto-Tune by non-binary artists. It also makes for a memorable interlude when Lorde stops the song to see to a fan in need of assistance, her instructions and support (“someone is coming!”) relayed in the voices of a dozen sad robots.
It somehow works in the anonymous corporate space that is the O2 – and all without the usual vulnerability-signalling piano ballad section or campfire-style acoustic guitar numbers. There is a lull in which Lorde plays a couple of unremarkable songs from her 2021 album Solar Power – still an underrated record on which she seemed to be checking out from fame. But it’s followed by a build to a rave climax (What Was That, Green Light) that has the venue bouncing, from the stalls to the nosebleed seats.
Choice cuts from Lorde’s back catalogue are subtly retooled for the occasion – The Louvre sounds immense – alongside a healthy complement of Virgin songs. More than one track seeks reinvention after a long-term relationship; there are heavy-duty mother issues on Favourite Daughter. One of the gig’s finest moments is Broken Glass, a bitter examination of disordered eating and how it takes over everything (“Did I cry myself to sleep about that? Cheat about that? Rot teeth about that? All of the above”). Lorde slowly tightens and undoes her leather belt; a dancer eats an apple.
Mid-gig, Lorde confides that she was having a terrible time around 2023, living in London and struggling with how to move forward personally and professionally. “I totally fell apart. I did not know I was going to keep doing this,” she confesses. “I had to do so much work on myself to be on any stage.” Cold water helped: she swam in the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath. There’s a welcome sense that Lorde’s nakedness is less about pop star sexiness than it is about simply having a body untethered from the usual gazes, and a new sense of curiosity about it.
The corporeal keeps cropping up. “We are a network of bodies, London,” she specifies on Team. The last song is the fan favourite: Ribs. The performance ends with the singer fully clad, with a black hoodie on, as though she’s ready to slink out the side door and join the queue for the tube: low-key, unstarry, a breath of fresh air.