Lorde
RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin
★★★☆☆
The set begins with a kind of studied plainness. Lorde arrives on the RDS stage on Saturday night in a haze of smoke and dramatic, minimalist lighting. She’s in low-slung blue jeans and a black T-shirt, her face dotted with a few gemstones, the kind you buy in a pack from Claire’s.
She sets the tone with Hammer, the first song from Virgin, her most recent album: intimate and a touch menacing, full of brooding romance.
The lights come up, the drum machines drop into Royals, and there’s a collective surge. Everyone in the audience knows every line. The song, her first hit, from 2013, is still as clear and perfectly cut as a diamond.
The videographer knows that close-ups are where Lorde is most magnetic. Her uniquely expressive face can convey both rage and vulnerability, and let emotion build and sharpen and morph.
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The visuals are striking: monochrome snippets, jittery angles, live footage captured from a roaming fan-height phone camera. As the show progresses, the video design becomes increasingly elaborate: live footage intercut with preshot fragments, mirrored perspectives and high contrast, blue-soaked camerawork. The montage effect is artsy, a little uneasy and completely mesmerising.
Two dancers join her in bold, expressionistic thrashing movements. During Broken Glass, a song about Lorde’s eating disorder, one of them eats an apple in aggressive, stylised bites projected in close up while the singer unbuckles her belt and tightens it around her waist, holding the strap and howling as if she’s emptying herself of the song.
Later she unzips her jeans entirely and steps out of them, revealing blue boxers. The gesture is tonally perfect: intimate, confrontational and effortlessly sexy.
She does lose her cool somewhat during a lengthy, poorly calculated monologue that falls into an uncanny valley of earnestness.
“It took me a long time to get here, Dublin, and I come here and feel so profoundly understood and loved, and I feel the same way about you. I want to know about your day and your week. I want to wipe that little smudge of make-up from the corner of your face, if you know what I mean.”
She goes on like this for at least five minutes, flitting between baffling sentimentality and self-aggrandising comments about her artistic process, how she has to “dredge the songs from the very depths of my soul”. It’s eye-glazing stuff. Even the teenagers next to me with adoring MDMA expressions lose interest and drift towards the smoking area.
Which is frustrating, because musically Lorde still has greatness within grasp. Liability, which she slips into right after her speech, is a reminder of the precision and emotional clarity she can summon when she accesses what really matters to her. But too often the newer tracks lose urgency: the same muted synth palettes, and lyrics that strive to be relatable but in doing so lose the audience.
What started off as cool restraint settles over the night into a flat chill.
