It’s a warm Auckland Wednesday, and Spark Arena is buzzing with excitement, and the smell of Ariana Grande perfume.
The Auckland-born singer Lorde (29) played the iconic New Zealand venue, Spark Arena, in front of 13,000 of her fans, dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and her signature black curls. As she started her set, the stage was aglow with a single white laser light, highlighting her silhouette as she slowly rose into view.
The dramatics are on 100 tonight.
The pop star is currently on her “Ultrasound World Tour”, promoting her recent 2025 album, “Virgin”, across the globe. The album’s themes of self acceptance, late nights, and jarring experiences, are communicated beautifully on-stage by Lorde, her two dancers, and her full-size band.
Her hometown show reads as a victory lap of sorts, with ‘Royals’ sounding more like the battle cry of a hometown hero, embracing her fellow soldiers. A Captain returning from battle to her troops. Her steely persona was quietly internally fought, as she struggled to hide small smiles of excitement as she performed for her home town. Knowing her parents were probably somewhere in the audience didn’t stop her from getting intimate with the crowd, though. “I wrote this song in the shower after kissing someone I really liked, so now when I sing it, I gotta be wet.” she proclaimed cheekily as she poured water down her chest, before singing the song “GRWM”.
Now, if you saw Lorde the last time she was in Auckland, this show was a big departure from the sunny aesthetic she established with her 2021 album, “Solar Power”. This production was all intense strobes, colorful lasers, and nighttime excitement. At one point, a ring of lights descends from the ceiling, and shines up and down around Lorde’s body, mimicking an X-ray, to match her album cover of her scanned pelvis.
To say she was happy to be home is an understatement. Lorde made an effort to make this show its own, even performing the first half of her song “Oceanic Feeling” in Māori, before switching to the English version after the second verse.
At the end of the night, the last trick up her LED sleeve was a small B-stage at the back of the arena where she performed the song Ribs as her final song of the night. A song about friendship and love echoed through the arena as couples kissed, friends hugged each other, and Lorde herself belted out their soundtrack. As the house lights came up, and Lorde disappeared below the stage, the rafters were still vibrating with the pure energy of the synthesisers, the electricity of the lasers, and the booming message of the show; to embrace love.
