Unadorned and uninhibited, Lorde’s ‘Ultrasound’ tour rocks Philly

On the last day of September, Lorde asked, “Do you have the stones?” and dared us to be brave and meet her where she is. She danced on stage like some greater power was physically pulling the music out of her. Her movements were jerky, wild, and loose. It was uninhibited, almost like we were watching her dance around in her bedroom. Except, instead of her bedroom, it was the stage of Xfinity Mobile Arena, and we were dancing with her. 

 The stage design on Lorde’s Ultrasound tour, supporting her 2025 album Virgin, was bare compared to tours’ past. During her Melodrama tour, she had a big floating box full of dancers, and on Solar Power, she had a huge sundial on stage. For this run, she relied pretty much on effects from lights and the dancing between her and her two dancers behind her. She took a page out of the Charli XCX playbook, and had people on stage with cameras to project onto bigger screens behind her, almost like paparazzi. For a few songs, though, it was just teeny tiny Lorde, on a huge stage at a sold out arena. It felt a bit like watching the daydream of a little girl wanting to be a pop star unfold right in front you. 

Lorde opened the night with “Hammer,” one of the singles off Virgin. This song, like much of the album, is a reckoning with who she is against who she used to be: “I burn and I sing and I scheme and I dance / Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man.” And as if to remind us that we’ve been watching her come into herself for over a decade, she followed this up with “Royals,” the song that launched her to stardom in 2013. 

During “David,” she walked through the crowd like a cult leader meeting their newest recruits. She sang, “Was I just young blood to get on tape? / ‘Cause you dimed me out, when it got hard / Uppercut to the throat, I was off guard / Pure heroine, mistaken for featherweight.” Again, referencing the passage of time, the song reflects on the consequences of getting into a dream industry that she didn’t fully understand yet. Pure Heroine, her first album, came out almost exactly 12 years ago. We’ve watched her develop from the industry’s marionette into an expert puppeteer making us dance and sing and cry. When she says “I don’t belong to anyone,” I believe her. Because it’s not about loneliness or isolation, it’s about ownership and autonomy. 

To end the show, Lorde popped up on a B-stage by the soundboard. It was less a stage and more an elevated podium. It was small, and she was alone. This was where she sang “A World Alone” and “Ribs.” Just her, the lights, and us, dancing together like we weren’t in an arena but instead a tight, intimate club. It was during the encore where Lorde felt the most tangible, on the same level as the rest of us.

Just like her first time at what was then the Wells Fargo Center, she had two openers. The Japanese House is a dreamy, British artist whose real name is Amber Bain. They sounded incredible, but it was hard to focus on that when so many people were filtering into the arena. Arena shows are bittersweet, because they leave room for more people to hit the stage, but they ultimately do the first act a disservice because they may as well be playing to an empty room. The band came to Philly within the last few years and played at Union Transfer, a room much more equipped for this kind of easy-going sound. 

Multi-instrumentalist and producer extraordinaire Blood Orange, aka Dev Hynes, was next. He is undeniably smart. Jumping between guitar, keys, vocals, and cello, he was everywhere all the time. But sometimes, his presence was missed. There were some moments, like in “Best To You” where he handed the vocal reigns to other singers on stage when it might’ve been nicer to hear him sing. Blood Orange released his newest album Essex Honey just over a month ago. On it, he has features from Caroline Polachek and Lorde herself, but despite my own personal anticipation, he didn’t bring Lorde out to sing her brief feature. The audience went pretty wild for the more mainstream stuff, like the amazing “Champagne Coast.” It felt like they were still working out how to do these new songs live, and this maybe wasn’t the crowd for the test drive.

Lorde’s relationship with Philadelphia is pre-teen aged. We’ve been lucky to watch her grow up in front of us and to be a human on a worldwide stage. In a few years, she’ll be living the next chapter of her life alongside us, and hopefully we get to do this all again.