Lorde — AO Arena, Manchester | 15 November 2025

Rating: 8/10

There’s a particular kind of anticipation that builds in a crowd waiting for someone who’s been away long enough that their return feels genuinely uncertain. Lorde had been gone four years when Virgin dropped earlier this year, and the AO Arena — stuffed to its rafters on a wet Saturday in November — felt like a city collectively exhaling. Manchester has a way of making artists feel like they belong to it. Tonight, it was willing to share.

The Ultrasound World Tour opened its UK and Ireland leg here, which meant that when the lights dropped at just past nine o’clock, nobody in this building had any idea what was coming. The stage was bare and futuristic, stripped back in a way that felt deliberate rather than sparse. Then the humming pulses of “Hammer” filled the room — a synth-drenched thing about rebirth and bodily autonomy that has no business sounding this enormous in a live context — and Lorde walked out in a plain purple tee and baggy jeans, looking like someone who’d just wandered in from the tour bus, and proceeded to throw herself around the stage like she was trying to escape her own skeleton.

It was an extraordinary opening gambit. Two contemporary dancers joined her, and the lighting rig — razorblades of white cutting through the dark — made all three of them look like they were being sliced apart. The effect was arresting without being theatrical for its own sake. Virgin has been described as a return to Lorde’s synth-pop instincts after the sunlit folk of Solar Power, and live, that pivot makes complete sense. This is music that wants a room.

What followed was a setlist that trusted its audience to keep up. “Royals” arrived second, which in lesser hands would feel like a desperate crowd-pleaser, but here landed like a statement of continuity — she’s never stopped being the teenager who wrote that song, she’s just accumulated a great deal more to say. “Buzzcut Season” came shortly after, Lorde crouching down to stare directly into a three-foot glowing floor fan for the entirety of a verse, the image weirdly hypnotic and completely her own. The crowd sang every word back without prompting.

The first act closed on “Favourite Daughter” and “Perfect Places” — two songs that exist in completely different emotional registers but share a quality of longing that’s hard to articulate and impossible to fake.

“All of my night, I got what I prized / Was it real, was it right?”

“Perfect Places” still sounds like the end of something. In this context, it felt like a door being gently closed before the room rearranged itself for what came next.

The middle section of the show belonged to Virgin and to surprise. “400 Lux” was the shock of the night — joining the setlist as an unannounced addition to some of the loudest screaming the AO Arena has produced this year, rivalling anything we heard there during the festival season. “Supercut” featured Lorde running the full outro on a treadmill, a gimmick that somehow didn’t feel like a gimmick. “The Louvre” was tender and generous, offered to the room rather than performed at it.

The Solar Power section asked everyone to sit down for the first time, which in an arena feels like an act of genuine nerve. “Big Star” — a slow, soft elegy of a track — had the band lie flat on the floor while Lorde sang it standing still, and the stillness landed harder than almost anything else in the night. When the silence broke, it broke with real force.

“What Was That,” the lead single that became her first US number one on Spotify since “Royals” and cracked the UK top three, arrived late in the set and sounded like the reason the tour exists. It’s the song that explains Virgin to anyone still uncertain — a clean, propulsive piece of pop writing with a hook that takes up permanent residence whether you want it to or not. Live, it consumed the room. The screens went white. The whole thing became one sustained roar.

She closed on “Ribs,” which remains one of the best songs she’s ever written — sixteen-year-old panic frozen in amber — and the choice to end there rather than on something triumphant felt honest in a way that a lot of arena pop isn’t. No confetti cannon. No second finale. Just that song, and then the lights.

There are quibbles. The show ran under two hours, and given the depth of the catalogue she was navigating — “No Better,” “Liability,” “Team” all appeared mid-set without the space they deserve — it occasionally felt like a sprint through a museum. The production design, brilliant in its spare brutalism, sometimes meant the edges of the AO Arena felt disconnected from what was happening on stage, a problem the venue has always had and one that no lighting rig can entirely solve.

But these feel like small complaints in the face of what Lorde is doing right now. Virgin is her most focused album since Pure Heroine, and the Ultrasound Tour has found a staging language to match it. She has never looked more at ease, or more in control, and the two things are not in contradiction — they’re the result of an artist who’s worked out, finally, that she doesn’t need to perform confidence because she actually has some.

If this is what the rest of the UK leg looks like, London is in for something.