Lorde returns to a sold-out All Points East eight years after playing its debut edition in 2018, delivering one of the most heart-pounding, ritualistic and cathartic shows of her career. Obtaining a ticket for Saturday night meant witnessing history.
Fans spend the day moving between CLASH-approved acts before , prepped perfectly for their headliner. Darkness and dust settle as blue-washed faces buzz with anticipation. Suddenly pulsing, distorted synths crack the silence, and Lorde’s face appears on screen beside what seems to be an MRI machine. She clips heart-rate monitors to her chest: proof that the next ninety minutes will be raw and messy — just as she’s planned.
Five minutes in and it’s already beautifully chaotic. Lorde has a metallic black tracksuit on, her mic clipped to her belt like a weapon. The distorted opening of ‘Hammer’ can be heard before brutally snapping into , and the crowd chants back every word like a ritual. ‘Broken Glass’ lands even harder: a song about disordered eating, self-hatred and the slow work of healing, accompanied by angry red strobes and flashing images of ‘Lorde’ stripping off her jacket as if shedding a bruised layer of herself.
“Victoria Park, we’re going to go crazy tonight!” she tells the crowd, before ‘Shapeshifter’ has her crawling onto the podium on all fours, staring through glass directly into the eyes of the audience. She sings of her past crisis identity as she pulses with a silhouette of herself on screen. The song ends with, “tonight I just want to fall”, and she collapses against the glass as the cameras performatively lose their signal.
‘Buzzcut Season’ begins: a throwback to her debut album ‘Pure Heroine’, and the crowd is launched into the past. ‘Favourite Daughter’ follows, driven by precise movement sequences accompanied by blue strobes. Everywhere you look, an element of the show grasps you, similar to ‘Lorde’s’ emotional vocals. ‘The Louvre’ brings a rare moment of romantic levity: Lorde tells the crowd about a crush she had at this festival two years ago: “it’s almost agony, that crush… it’s so good!”, before revealing he’s in the audience tonight, the screaming support of fifty thousand fans follows as if they were her closest friends.
During the ultimate crash-out song ‘Hard Feelings’, the camera flips to a sniper’s-eye view following Lorde as she prowls with predatory energy, her heart rate glitching on screen, a reflection of a relationship dying in real time. Sparks rain from the rig as she pulls a dancer into an embrace and the crowd sees an intimate close-up of her for the song’s final lines.
‘Liability’ is where the emotions take over, a montage of Lorde as a crying child is projected across her black t-shirt, and the crowd falls silent, tears in their eyes. However, the energy quickly soars again, as a collection of hits roll out: ’Supercut’ creates a human-made earthquake; ‘Team’ pulls the park into a surge of nostalgia and ‘Man Of The Year’ presents ‘Lorde’ shooting red lasers from her torso. The long-awaited ‘Girl, So Confusing’ drops with Charli xcx’s verse screamed back in unison from the crowd, before finally ‘Green Light’ executes with every hand in the green-lit air and another tremor ripples through the park.
‘David’ is the night’s painful gut-punch, with Lorde reclaiming her power. The audience watches as a white flag reading “I don’t belong to anyone, 2013” is passed through the pit to the lyrics, “was I just someone to dominate?” Then, in the blink of an eye, the show reaches the final track, and Lorde has torn off her t-shirt and heart-rate monitor. She sprints through the VIP pit onto a mini stage surrounded by the crowd for ‘Ribs’. What feels like miles of humans are screaming, “laughing till our ribs get tough” as East London lights up in colour.
She tells the crowd to “share cigarettes, share drugs, share tampons — to stay present, stay connected”. It’s the closing piece of advice from Ella Yelich-O’Connor, professionally known as Lorde. The show is a well-oiled one-of-a-kind machine: every lighting cue, note change and camera angle has been chosen to serve a specific lyric or motif. What did Lorde bring to All Points East? Powerful vocals, meticulously engineered production, and an unforgettable human experience.
