Each line sung as if plucked euphorically from the air
Exactly four years to the day before her triumphant performance at Alexandra Palace in north London, Lorde released her debut album, Pure Heroine.
On it, through minimalist, angular electropop, the New Zealand musician framed herself as an anthropologist of teenage life, observing youth from the outskirts. A meticulous over-thinker, she worried about the fame she didn’t yet have, and how it would affect the experiences she hadn’t yet enjoyed. She sat in the passenger seat of her own life, only 16 years old but already “over being told to throw my hands up in the air”.
With her second album, this year’s aptly named Melodrama, things have changed. Emerging from a well-documented relationship bruised but reborn, she’s found a place where she can revel in all the explosive, contradictory shards of her emotions, no longer treating her own youth with suspicion.
She’s still in the passenger seat, but only because she’s on her way to a place where she can drink, dance, “spill my guts beneath the outdoor light” and indulge in the hedonistic joy of being young. “I think joy is so much more transcendent than pain,” she told Marc Maron on his American podcast WTF. “It’s really easy to make work out of pain, but choosing joy is quite difficult, and quite noble.”
On Wednesday, in front of 10,000 people, she chose joy. Throughout her set, which drew equally from her two albums, the 20-year-old’s deep, elegant voice prickled with feeling, each line sung as if plucked from the air, as she twitched and twirled like a manic ballerina torn loose from her music box.
“I like playing in London, because I’m kinda awkward, and you’re kinda awkward,” she deadpanned. “We’re all weird about expressing ourselves, but I feel like you’re gonna go f------ crazy with me tonight.”
Her hunch was right. As she launched into the wistfully exuberant Hard Feelings, the rapt crowd pulsed along to a drum machine, before falling under a reverent spell for both Buzzcut Season – on which Lorde knelt on the floor, unfolded a plastic xylophone and tapped out its opening notes – and intimate piano ballad Liability.
For the most part, though, Lorde opted for big, bittersweet euphoria over restraint, as a bracing cover of Phil Collins’s In The Air Tonight segued into party parable Perfect Places, during which she leapt from the stage, buried herself in the crowd’s embrace, and planted a kiss on a fan’s freshly tattooed forearm.
She ended with Green Light, her vocals so fiercely delivered, and her dancing so invigorating, that the light show and confetti explosion seemed superfluous.
Melodrama indeed.