Taking to the stage in baggy jeans and a baby tee, Lorde gave Melbourne fans the realest, rawest version of herself.
There were no gimmicks at Rod Laver Arena for Lorde on Saturday night.
No theatrics, no overblown spectacle. And yet, over 14,000 people were pulled into something that felt impossibly intimate. On the Melbourne stop of her Ultrasound World Tour, Lorde proved that she can make a packed arena feel like an art school performance: pure, raw, and entirely present.
“I feel like I met most of you at Hope Street Radio last night,” she joked, instantly breaking the fourth wall. The crowd screamed.
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She opened the show with Hammer followed by the thrum of Royals, the 2013 breakout hit she wrote as a quirky, eyelinered 16-year-old. The Lorde in front of us tonight was stripped-back and confident, wearing a red baby tee and a pair of baggy jeans she told us she found at her grandfather’s house. Her presence felt somewhere between an iconic pop star commanding a stage and a girl alone in her bedroom.
“I always feel like I’m in a bedroom,” she told the audience a few songs in. We felt lucky enough to have been invited in.
Just like the iridescent aesthetic surrounding her latest album, Virgin, the crowd shifted with her, seamlessly oscillating between a raging nightclub for high-energy tracks like ‘Green Light’ and ‘What Was That’, slowing back down for tender moments like ‘Liability’.
The staging was minimal. Two dancers moved beside her with an ease that felt less choreographed and more communal, like old friends living inside the music rather than performing it. During Supercut, she pounded atop an oversized treadmill, a kinetic metaphor for memory and momentum; running in place, the past at her heels, flashing in strobe. Later, lying flat on her back to sing Big Star, she transformed the sold-out arena into something closer to a sacred confessional.
Metallic silver became its own language across the night; glinting on her fingertips, her eyelids, her belly button. Later, she seemed to emerge topless, her chest painted in chrome, vulnerable and defiant all at once. It felt less like provocation and more like reclamation; a visual echo of an album that interrogates the body as much as it inhabits it.
Virgin was at full volume on the Ultrasound World Tour, her first time performing these songs live. But she revisited many iconic tracks from across her discography, from Pure Heroin and Melodrama to Solar Power. It didn’t feel like a greatest hits run-through, more a thoughtfully curated narrative, older songs sitting seamlessly beside newer ones, a journey through growth that also shone the mirror back at us.
Halfway through the set, she sat down to speak to her fans.
“Melbourne, I’ve been coming here for 12 years now. I’ve been so many different versions of myself sitting on the stage in front of you. But I really feel like tonight, the woman who is here is a very pure representation of who I am. There is very little distance.”
Lorde delivered a line that seemed to crystallise the entire show: “You’ve stayed the course with me.” A confession that felt like a thank you and an acknowledgement not only of her evolution, but of our own.
The transitions themselves were notable. Recognisable intro beats and iconic riffs were remixed, reversed, and reverbed into transient sonic fusions, simulating anticipation, the same feeling of hearing the song for the first time.
“If you know me, you know one of my favourite things is to write songs about archetypes,” she said early on. Later, more candid: “I’m struggling with my body image, my gender, shit got kind of weird there… but no, I really feel like we have grown together.”
Many of us grew up with her, 13 years of soundtracking our adolescence. Pure Heroine isn’t just an album, it’s a timestamp. Hearing it woven seamlessly into Virgin felt like running into an old friend; even if you’ve outgrown each other, the feelings and memories persist. Virgin feels palpably more adult, but still messy.
She reflected on Melbourne with visible affection. “I remember the last time I came to Melbourne, I had an epiphanic experience… I was completely obsessed, like I truly could move here.” She recalled playing in the city soon after lockdowns lifted. “You were levitating. You were so happy to be back in a crowd… you gave me something that night.”
Standing beneath a pyramid of electric blue lasers for ‘Clearblue’, her voice was raw and the music completely stripped: “After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy, praying in MP3…” The arena held its breath. The song looped with a single radiating light; she sang with no backing track, completely minimal, like we were inside the thought itself.
Suddenly, a change in tone from the grittiness of her other three albums: “Is anyone familiar with a little 2020 album called Solar Power?” she jests. The warm wash of ‘Oceanic Feeling’ plays out, and she shouts out to her home country, drawing audible sighs from kindred Kiwis in the crowd.
The hit single from Virgin, ‘Man of the Year’, exploded in the space – literally – as white confetti rained down over the crowd in a baptism of paper and light. She wore an illuminated jacket, moving through the crowd as she sang ‘David’, the closing track of Virgin and, seemingly, the night’s final song.
A purple beam projected from the stage, skimming over her as her silver-tipped fingers reached into the light. The line, “pure heroine mistaken for featherweight,” landed with particular force, a nod to her debut and the weight she has carried since. Deliberate and undeniable.
Teasing us with an encore atop a raised plinth, after a near two-hour performance, she finally closed out the show with ‘Ribs’. Despite the song’s slower pace, she still managed to transform the arena into a pulsing dancehall. The whole crowd entranced and moving in unison, the vibe as euphoric as the lyrics. “I’ve never felt more alone, it feels so scary getting old” hung above us, as her fingertips flickered in the lilac pool of laser lights above her head.
Detailing a narrative of growth, reflection and acceptance, Lorde sang about love, crushes, body image, gender identity, family, trauma, and the strange dissonance of existing in 2026. “I feel increasingly these days like I don’t know what is real,” she admitted. “It is a very strange world out there.” And yet, for nearly two hours, it felt clear.
Catharsis feels like an overused word in live music reviews, but here, it feels exact. Lorde didn’t just show us her growth, she mirrored ours back to us, silver-tipped and shining. We go through our phases.
We do our thing. And then, as she put it, “we come back together and spill it all and shed a tear and let it all go together.”
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