Lorde’s long-awaited return to the East Bay was more than just a coincidence – it was a personal request.
The New Zealand pop singer told a sold-out crowd at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 19, that the warm welcome she received at the historic venue more than a decade ago has remained a “vivid memory” as her career exploded in the 2010s.
“I remember it was just this roaring wall of people. I had never seen anything like this. It totally imprinted in my mind that day,” she recalled, noting that the 2014 performance was one of her first-ever in America.
“When we were booking this tour, I literally had one request: I said, ‘Could we play the Greek?’ So this is officially a passion situation for me, the reason we’re here.”
Lorde wasn’t the only one feeling sentimental. Thousands of fans packed the Greek on Sunday evening for the singer’s only Bay Area stop on her Ultrasound Tour, which supports her latest album, “Virgin.”
“This was the first time I cried at a concert,” said 25-year-old Jason Friedman, who drove up from the South Bay for the show with his girlfriend, Katherine Li.
The couple said they’ve been fans of Lorde since her 2013 debut, “Pure Heroine,” but had never seen her in concert until Sunday’s show.
“I don’t know if that’s more about the memories it surfaced for me or just her ability to reach you in a certain kind of way, but either way it was definitely a concert experience that I’ve literally never had before,” Friedman said.
It was a fitting reaction to a concert that traded spectacle for sincerity.
The show’s production was minimal, relying mostly on smoke machines and colorful strobe lights while the musician thrashed around the stage alone.
The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s Berkeley show was the only Bay Area stop on her Ultrasound Tour. She’s pictured here at the Glastonbury festival in June in Glastonbury, England. (Joseph Okpako/WireImage)
When her two backup dancers did appear, they performed mundane tasks like walking on a treadmill and doing sprints across the stage or sitting on the floor eating an apple. But the restraint felt intentional, turning the Greek’s vast stage into something unexpectedly intimate.
“I thought it was very artistic, very powerful,” said Li, also 25. “I’ve always been very amazed at how she’s able to express the coming-of-age feelings so eloquently.”
For a majority of her cathartic set, Lorde simply wore a blue T-shirt and light-wash jeans, which she peeled off during her performance of “Current Affairs.” She proceeded to perform in her baby-blue Calvin Klein underwear for a few more tracks.
Near the end of the show, during “Man of the Year,” the lights dimmed as she pulled off her shirt and placed gray tape over her chest, which she previously revealed she does as a way to explore gender identity.
While her set list focused heavily on “Virgin,” Lorde still made room for nostalgia. She reached back to her breakthrough hit “Royals” and the deep cut “Buzzcut Season,” and dipped into her sophomore record, “Melodrama,” for tracks like “Supercut,” “The Louvre” and “Green Light.”
Though Lorde mostly performed tracks off her recent album, “Virgin,” she dug deeper into her discography to perform some fan favorites throughout her Greek Theatre show on Sunday. She’s pictured here at the Glastonbury festival in June in Glastonbury, England. (Joseph Okpako/WireImage)
Though the singer, now 28, wrote those earlier records in her teenage years, she welcomed the chance to revisit them.
“You can’t leave any part of yourself behind,” she said before launching into the 2013 song “No Better,” which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. “They’re all coming with us, baby.”
But the loudest cheers of the night came while Lorde sang her 2013 radio hit “Team,” which recently resurfaced in 2023 on TikTok after Palestinian Canadian singer Nemahsis shared a cover pairing the song with images of destruction in Gaza, giving the song new meaning.
Though Lorde didn’t explicitly voice support for Palestinians on Sunday, as she has done at past shows, the crowd and stage were bathed in red, green and white lights – the colors of the Palestinian flag – for the song’s final chorus.
“I sit before you, a woman at peace,” Lorde said while kneeling on the stage before singing “Liability,” a quiet piano ballad off “Melodrama.” “A woman excited for the future and a woman galvanized to do what’s right.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the last time Lorde performed at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. It was 2014.
This article originally published at Lorde personally requested to perform at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre. Here’s why.
