Pop tours in 2025 are generally one of two categories: extravagant spectacle or stripped-down dance party. Lorde’s “Ultrasound World Tour” is, refreshingly, something in the middle. While other stars have cornered the market on being the provocateur, the drama queen, the rock star, the posh performer, Lorde has always presented as the more left-of-center, elemental type. So, it’s fitting that her show at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, October 1st was equally idiosyncratic.
The stage itself was purposefully sparse: a giant square speaker stack sat at the back, the band was split and sunken into pits on either side of the stage, and a small thrust stage extended into the crowd. Arguably, the centerpiece was the large flat screen along the back of the stage, as each song received a unique visual presentation combining graphic work and numerous onstage cameras, usually with an additional piece of stage design brought on to switch things up.
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On “Buzzcut Season” for example, Lorde sang into and reeled in front of a giant industrial fan. It wasn’t the most engaging stage prop — this large, squarish black thing just sitting kitty corner on the side of the stage — but somewhere in there was a camera that projected a bisected and rectangular view of the New Zealand singer up onto that big screen. When it showed just a narrow strip of her eyes, what once seemed like a base prop decision revealed far deeper creative decisions.
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The ring of lights that dropped from the ceiling for “Shapeshifter” cast a wispy point cloud rendering of Lorde on the screen. During “Favourite Daughter,” her push-pull movements controlled her pair of background dancers movement specialists as well as the flashes of five different camera angles. On mid-show standout “Supercut,” which saw the already famous treadmill take center stage, the screen was cut into various angles showing equally various shots: overhead, directly to face, straight at her feet.
As with anyone trying something constantly creative, it didn’t always work. One of the extras pointing a camera directly at Lorde’s bellybutton as she rolled and flexed during “GRWM” wore out its welcome, and the overhead shot of her and her guitarist lying on the ground overlayed with a 2014 MacOS screensaver for “Big Star” felt like either the first thought or just wanting to take it easier on a slow song.
But there were other neat tricks being played as well. A freestanding screen with a center mounted camera was wheeled out ahead of “No Better” (a Pure Heroine bonus cut Lorde is dusting off for the first time in over a decade on for this tour); Lorde spoke into the cam with her back toward the audience, her enlarged form looking out at the crowd via the screen in a sort of real-life livestream layering in on itself. More simply, intersecting beams of light during early setlist highlight “Perfect Places” dramatically formed a glowing belt as she stood at their crosspoint.
Of course, there were plenty of dance party moments as well. The one-two-three of “Team,” “What Was That,” and “Green Light” were mainly standard light shows — good light shows, but standard — and that’s really all you needed for such certifiable bops to get the crowd bouncing. There was a moment in “Team,” however, that went beyond “standard”: as Lorde rose on that center lift again, the colors shift to green, red, and white. The young crowd cheered their approval, recognizing what was happening even before Lorde screamed, “Free fucking Palestine!” ahead of the final chorus breakdown.
She also addressed the crowd for nonpolitical statements. Expressing how blown away she was to be back at a venue like MSG, she credited moving to New York City in 2021 as giving birth to the “honest, non-dramatized” album Virgin. “There’s a real beauty in stripping away the layers,” she said. “Whatever you put on or make up is probably not as beautiful as what is raw dog underneath.” She told her fans that their willingness to take that rawness at face value and carry it with them “inspires me to keep trying to peel off a layer to show you what’s underneath, because I know now you know exactly what to do with it.”
(Odd that that speech came before Melodrama cut “Liability” instead of a Virgin track, though…)
The “Ultrasound World Tour” concert in turn felt peeled back, like watching a deconstructed music video production — a multimedia experience that showed the action and result all in one fascinating moment. In an age where, even at its most creative, pop is delivering in-your-face excess, Lorde’s seems to be deliberately striving to do the most with comparatively not much. Which isn’t to say that insanely fast cameras, complex programming, raising platforms, and multiple kinetic lighting rigs are “not much,” but the visual feat is more focused on excess of technical choreography and design rather than pure spectacle.
See it for yourself by getting tickets to the rest of Lorde’s “Ultrasound World Tour” dates here, and find photos from her Madison Square Garden show (including shots of opener The Japanese House) below.