Oh Lorde! Rocking down to Electric Avenue
‘‘It’s pretty amazing to share the stage with such popular artists in this day and age . . .’’
Karl Steven
Supergroove lead singer
Lorde will make her New Zealand festival debut at Christchurch’s Electric Avenue festival in February.
The Kiwi global superstar is one of the first headline acts to be announced for the festival in Hagley Park on Saturday, February
26, 2022.
Electric Avenue, the first date of a nine-date Australasian tour for Lorde and her first New Zealand shows since 2017, features 35 artists performing across four stages over 12 hours.
Callam Mitchell, director of Team Events, said he was ‘‘stoked’’ to have an artist of Lorde’s calibre on the lineup. ‘‘Lorde truly is an international superstar and a household name around the world, so to have her performing at Electric Avenue for what will be her first ever festival appearance in this country is huge for us,’’ he said.
Lorde will perform alongside Drax Project, Harper Finn, Lee Mvtthews, Summer Thieves and the return of ‘90s legends Supergroove, with more acts to be announced in September.
Electric Avenue launched in
2015 and is New Zealand’s largest music festival. Tickets to this year’s event, attended by 30,000 people, sold out a month in advance, with nearly 15,000 people registered on a waiting list. Mitchell said he did not have plans to increase the festival size at this stage.
The festival and tour announcement comes on the back of the release of Solstice, the second single from Lorde’s upcoming album, Solar Power. The album’s first single, Solar Power, was cowritten by Lorde and Jack Antonoff, and its video was viewed more than 13 million times in 10 days.
The new material is Lorde’s first since 2017’s Melodrama, following her 2013 debut and double Grammy Award-winning album Pure Heroine. The latter, released when she was 16, contained international chart-topping hits Royals and Tennis Court.
She has now sold more than 12 million albums. Sources suggest Solar Power may be released in August.
Her inspiration could have come from her recent visit to Antarctica.
In an email in November to fans about the visit, the Green Light singer wrote: ‘‘Albums live in their own realms in a way, and Antarctica really acted as this great white palette cleanser, a sort of celestial foyer I had to move through in order to start making the next thing.’’
Supergroove were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2014 and are reforming for the Electric Avenue performance.
The funk rock band’s lead singer, Karl Steven, is an awardwinning composer of music to picture. His recent score for the film Come To Daddy, starring Elijah Wood, won the APRA Silver Scrolls award for best music in a feature film, and was among the Film Music Institute’s best scores of 2020.
‘‘The lineup looks great. It’s pretty amazing to share the stage with such popular artists in this day and age, so we feel delighted to be invited to join in,’’ Steven said.
Electric Avenue has previously hosted international and national artists including Rudimental, Ben Harper, Pendulum, Lime Cordiale, Benee and Shapeshifter. Tickets go on sale at 12pm on Monday.