By Maddy Posner //
Seven years after first playing at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia for her Melodrama tour, Lorde returned two albums later to perform her newest album, Virgin, to a crowd of over twenty thousand. From her theatrical sequence of dressing and undressing to the specificity of the dancers’ motions to the custom confetti – printed with the words in the blue light at ULTRASOUND – the performance skipped from flashy to entertaining to resoundingly intimate.
About an hour into the concert, as the opening to “Liability” slowly began and looped over itself, Lorde sat on her knees in the center of the stage, body awash in a blue glow. “Will you let me see their faces,” she asked someone behind the scenes, and the lights subsequently dimmed and faded. “You all look astonishingly beautiful. This is very unusual for me, playing in rooms this big. It’s not something I’ve done for [much] of my career. But I absolutely love it, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here.”
“[It’s] bizarre, my first album Pure Heroine came out twelve years ago. I really feel the passing of time. I’m 28 now, I was 16 when I met you. And we’ve really grown up together,” Lorde said, holding the mic up to her mouth as she spoke.
This idea of getting older was a central focus in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of the concert. Though Lorde has always been a representative of the pains of growing up and coming-of-age, with popular songs like “Ribs” giving voice to pangs of suburban ennui, the review touched on the ways in which “Lorde’s fan base has officially entered adulthood.” Though her music previously centered on “underage drinking and yearning to escape suburbia,” these songs “have been supplanted by ones of bodily autonomy, self-examination, and alienation from one’s youth.”
Lorde signaled both directly and indirectly that she has entered a new era; the concert itself embodied a fusion of current and past selves. The setlist included many old songs as well as new ones, and though the mood may have grown more mellow with tracks off of Solar Power like “Oceanic Feeling” and “Big Star,” there was a completeness in Lorde expressing each version of her past self on the big stage.
Fans enjoyed callbacks to Melodrama and Pure Heroine near the end of the concert. After descending the stage for “David,” Lorde cut through the center of the stage audience to perform “A World Alone.” As the crowd surged towards her makeshift podium, more space opened on the floor, allowing for isolated dancing while confetti rained down. “Ribs” was another celebrative act of nostalgia, prompting the entire audience to jump and scream along with the words. “I feel like the crowd was very engaged and it was just so much fun,” said Paola Almeda ‘29, who came to the show with a friend.
Many of Lorde’s old lyrics seem to resonate – if imperfectly so – with her grown self. When hearing the line “we’re dancing in this world alone,” one considers how Lorde has described her loneliness, contrasting against her descriptions of deep friendship or love, and emerging anew in her redefining of her aloneness over time. Before starting “Liability,” she said, “This is a song about when I felt my loneliest in the world and I would love your help singing.” The song may be about loneliness, but it’s also about coming back to oneself, and Lorde seems to have met herself with a kind of peace, at least in this moment.
Another old favorite, “Supercut,” from Melodrama, featured a treadmill, used by both the background dancers and Lorde herself. The song is, as the Inquirer relates, about “reliving memories from an old relationship.” There was a kind of performance to it, with one dancer running on the treadmill while another sprinted towards and away from the same treadmill, clutching her head as she paused before turning around again. This was the same dancer who poured water directly into Lorde’s mouth at another point in the concert. Lorde herself ascended the treadmill in the last moments of the song.
The same element of performance characterized much of the concert. Much of it connects back to Lorde’s grappling with gender expression, an experience she says relates to stopping birth control in 2023. Throughout the concert, her look shifted; she started in jeans and a blue shirt stuck together with silver duct tape. She lost the jeans early, though she later pulled the jeans back on and lost the shirt, revealing a black strip of duct tape wrapped around her chest. The two dancers – one male, and one female – may act as another twofold representation of her gender identity.
Virgin, Lorde’s newest album and the site of much of this gender exploration – both aesthetically and lyrically – largely received high ratings. It reflects themes about pregnancy, the human body, and growth into adulthood. Rolling Stone dubbed it a brilliant rebirth and “her most introspective record yet.” Returning to the topic of loneliness, Georgi comments on how “[Virgin is] the sound of an artist . . . learning to be OK with the uncertainty of solitude.” Despite Lorde’s not-knowing, and despite the ways she may have claimed to know it all in past songs, this album is her saying “she’s never had it figured out.” Sonically, the album itself is a revival of “the steely electronic world of dance-forward synth-pop,” yet the production is “much more sparse,” delivering a more personal output. Rolling Stone celebrates this on her behalf, emphasizing how she has been able to lean into “the chaos of reinvention” in a wholly new, intense yet intimate fashion.
“What I really loved about Virgin was it felt like Lorde openly sitting in this feeling of being lost and figuring things out,” said Xi Teng Tay ‘26, who showed up with two friends. “So I really liked when, before she performed “No Better,” she mentioned growing as an artist and finding this song from when she was fifteen stupid, but still worth performing.”
Lorde mentioned one political caveat of the ways she feels freed by reinvention. “I’m scared a lot of the time,” she said, “And I really believe that we need [love] more than ever.”
She points to community as another form of support that’s especially necessary for this time. “I believe in what happens in this room, when we get together, and let ourselves really feel something.” Lorde might not know all the answers, but no one does, and in the meantime, she’s putting on a fantastic performance.
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