Lorde has reached Berlin on her Ultrasound World Tour. As an artist who has been continuously exploring growing pains throughout her career, she now takes a deeper look back at the bittersweet nostalgia of adolescence, the exploration of gender identity and the process of growing out of one self and into another. On Lorde’s evolution as an artist and the evolution of a listener. A fan essay by Nadia Darmiche.
“We become our own sovereigns,” 29-year-old Lorde proclaims to the audience of her Ultrasound tour concert in Berlin, reminiscing about her relationship to the city that spans more than a decade, starting with her first world tour at merely 16. Only now she sits on the stage as an established pop icon, looking at the faces of thousands of people who all readily pull out their phones to record every second of her speech. “We grew up together. I know you.” Liability starts playing.
On a hot summer day after work, I took a walk. I decided rather spontaneously that I would be listening to all of Lorde’s discography that day. I put on my headphones and was ambitious enough to take my usual bus route by foot. This meant almost one hour of straight walking and four buses passing by me – enough time to listen to the first two albums. I hadn’t done that in a while – listening to an album in its entirety, let alone multiple in consecutive order.
A musical coming-of-age
When the first single from Virgin, What Was That, dropped, I was disappointed to say the least. I thought what I heard sounded like Lorde parodizing her own work and her persona – why are we talking about MDA and the best cigarettes of our lives right now? After all these years of listening to her, her words started to feel weirdly redundant.
To make the lyrics on album number four sound more juvenile than twelve years ago left me to think that maybe Lorde has already given us everything she had in her – an admittedly ridiculous thought that unfairly imposes the idea of the female artist in her prime, whose momentum and greatness could run out like fuel at any moment.
Lorde is no vocalist or performer in the traditional sense of the pop genre. What made her special is that she was so unapologetically different from her peers. She entered the industry and the cultural zeitgeist as a kind of musical wunderkind. Lorde was Tumblr, and she was glitter, ripped fishnets, and an instagrammable middle finger, giving a vessel to each stuck in teenage limbo. More importantly, she excelled at making an album – An art form on the verge of dying out in contemporary pop music, altered by the age of streaming. It was impossible not to listen to her work in its full entirety.
Those qualities are very much still present in Virgin. Only now, the album serves as a cathartic way of coping with the past, difficult to fully grasp outside of the context of her prior releases. Virgin marks Lorde’s inevitable return to the city after a prolonged break. A city that is still tainted by the growing pains she endured there in the beginning. A place that somehow rapidly changed, and yet in the grand scheme remained the same. When looking at Lorde’s discography as a sort of heroine’s journey, one might spot patterns relating to their own life: From Pure Heroine’s teenage antics set in suburban purgatory to leaving home and navigating early adulthood, and the first real heartbreak in Melodrama, up until Solar Power – a phase of breathing in again, gratitude, and a momentary feeling of peace. Virgin takes Lorde back to the city of Melodrama, only that now she is grown and trying to make sense of her identity. It’s a look back on her younger self, realising that the experiences she has previously written about were profoundly shaped by being brought up as a girl. In Virgin Lorde finds herself standing on the edge and looking down to try to find another way of being. In the process of reclaiming her own agency, she sings about rebirth, back when one existed as neither a man nor a woman but just as a child.
The unkemptness that ties it all together
At her concert, Lorde tells the audience that she writes songs about “the archetypal feelings of life,” and she seems to convey precisely that when on stage. In a vulnerable show, stripped of glitz and glamour, she jumps around in baggy jeans and a T-Shirt, unbuckling her belt in a projected close-up on the screen and drips water on her Calvin Klein boxers, all while the backing vocals of her younger self blend in with her matured voice. At one time she is running on a treadmill, and at another time a background dancer is eating an apple while simply sitting down. During Buzzcut Season – one of her most popular songs – she lights up the stage in the colors of the Palestinian flag, prompting cheers from the audience, as they later sing along: “We’re on each other’s team.” The people in the seated area stood up to dance around in the limited space they were given. Despite being in a huge venue and barely making out the artist’s face, it ended up being one of the most intimate concert experiences I’ve had so far. For a final encore, she makes her hands light up, ending the night with Ribs on the side of the venue opposite of the main stage. She then disappears into a sea of people while the speakers play All my Friends by LCD Soundsystem – a deliberate choice, it seems.
The significance of seeing an artist live you listened to as a teenager
I remember floating around adolescence as though it would cease to matter in the near future. When I think back, there was never really a time when I was a teenager, I was just a kid for all those years. And jumping from childhood straight to my early twenties means that the teenage parts of myself that I try to relocate in the back of my memory feel like nothing more than a faint sound of the music I listened to when I was an adolescent. I wouldn’t say I’ve grown out of the music I listened to at sixteen, but it does not provide me with the same sense of escapism that it used to. Being sixteen feels far away now – I’m sure it does for every student. But seeing an artist live, one I’ve admired for so long, was the closest I’ve come to accessing it again.
