Lorde’s tour-ending show at Annexet in Stockholm, 9th Dec
By Jane Hatfield
Sometimes the story starts at the ending. It’s 1:30 am, and I just got home from the Lorde concert. I’m all the way in Stockholm, Sweden. I look up to see if there’s any news already on the concert and I’m surprised to find an article has already dropped.
A write up on WPFR claims that Lorde was “subdued” and cited a lack of engagement and approval from her audience members.
My experience highlighted something different entirely.
Jumping up and down with the strangers surrounding me, making eye contact with the queen herself, and spitting out every lyric and harmony for two hours straight made the experience feel nothing other than energized and quite alive.
I’ll start back at the line, before we even got inside.
Arriving at Globen station from Skanstull, my jaw dropped off the tracks.
I was searching for confirmation that I was meant to be here.
As I saw the Annexet, I had shed a tear, I guess this was where I was supposed to be.
The Annexet seemed to be that sublime space where theory meets reality, where the stones are found, and conclusions of an ambiguous disposition and nature are drawn.
Is this where I am meant to be?
At the edge?
Of.. Stockholm?
I am number 154 in line. The Swedes slept here over night and decided to create an equitable system for building a line. Concert communism. Respectable manifestations of karma. Concert karma. Cookies to those who arrived before dawn, on the first or last train.
(There’s no last train in Europe and no one sleeps. And everyone goes out at 2 am. Except for Lorde apparently.)
Around 1 pm, I got a peek at the stage set-up as stage hands smoked their cigarettes outside. There was just one other girl watching. I checked my watch. Still 1 o’ clock.
I saw a girl go up to a sign that said “loka” and by 2 I had gotten my number. I had asked the girl next to me what it was for,
She says :
“ some girls have established a system, you should go sign up and get a number”
I chose the least frozen plot of black concrete possible, and pulled out my book, a sharpied 154 on my hand.
The line might be snaking halfway through Stockholm now — but I’m happy I came into the mall to get a scarf. It’s still two hours till showtime, nothing has changed much since we spoke but this napkin sure has — laden with ink — to line I go.
Time seems to stop as we smoke cigarettes, talk, a girl reads a textbook, girls eat sandwiches on the floor and everyone vapes. The lights inside the venue flicker on and off despite the consistently locked nature of the doors. Ominous, and I feel the light course through my concert ready bones.
I quickly assessed I would finish the book around 4 pm if all I did was consume Robert Bolaño’s prose on the state of Mexican poetry in 1968.
It felt like an apt read, as fragmented language alluding to the experience of the feminine mystery artist reminded me of Lorde’s explorations in the time of Virgin.
Virgin is full of snippets, metaphors, alliterations, and plays on words. Even Lorde’s use of GRWM, hinting at the TikTok phenomenon of a “Get ready with Me,” plays with modern conceptions of what it means to be a woman.
Bolano’s main character in “Amulet” is Auxillio, the “mother of Mexican poetry”. He uses a similar broken prose and ambiguous story-telling to reveal how she carries this title, and her discovery and experience of womanhood along the way.
I text explaining to a friend that I am in fact not in Finland, as I was supposed to be, I am in Stockholm, surrounded by teenage Swedes in heat blankets. No, its not the apocalypse, its simply a Lorde concert and its 3 pm, three hours before the doors open.
I read an article last night that described the concert as boring. I think there’s brilliance in her quietness.
Unlike the Taylor Swift concert I attended in 2023, Americans clad in pink, screaming Romeo and Juliet against the strength of a southern rain, the Swedish Lorde fans were docile. Clad mainly in black.
Much like the technicolor wave forms and holograms playing out on the screen behind her, Lorde oscillated between high energy pop anthems and quieter, calmer ballads, as if singing to herself for those more somber pieces.
One of my favorite songs of the night was “If she Could See Me Now”. This song too hints at the beautiful transition from youth into womanhood, a concept Bolano explores in great depth. I sure as hell was jumping.
And the concert was cohesive in its brokenness. Towards the end, Lorde said: “ I’m so grateful we could come together on a Tuesday , and break down a little bit.”
By leading with her own brokenness and vulnerability (Broken Glass), Lorde invites us to discover and tune in to our own.
Where I think these two literary geniuses parallel is in their use of hodge-podge metaphor to link stories and disparate memories together to arrive at a full picture of a philosophical turning point for the main character.
Lorde, lying on her back, commented at one point: “I sometimes think I’m stuck in a memory”. Her further explorations of womanhood, and manhood, in Man of the Year and Clearblue elucidate how important this journey has been in her development of self and might even connect to her “recent ego death”.
Bolaño writes of Auxillio’s womanhood in a less feminine manner, as a leader of a group of motley young male poets she doesn’t exactly exude and personify the stereotypical female figure of the time.
The broken literature prose is even melded together into Lorde’s signature, and embellished “e” hinting at a play on words so inherent it becomes her namesake.
Us both enraptured with words I guess.
There’s a whole other aspect of sexuality that we could dive into in comparing the two. Lorde is empowered in her artistic expression, filming herself, wearing nothing but duct-tape, unabashedly acting as an unpaid Calvin Klein advertisement, she twists our common perception of what a woman is expected to do and how she is expected to behave.
I see a similar sort of rebellion in Auxillio.
The two figures also rebel in their quietness, in their ability to stay still and know when to jump up and down and fight.
I was pissed to see that ugly review last night. I’m a tripped out American Lorde fan, and the fans I met in line in Stockholm were too.
We are grounded in our love of her raw vulnerability.
As her tour finale, I imagine Lorde is tired at this point, but she wasn’t quiet by any means.
The crowd roared with the first few chords of “Green Light”, one of her best songs to this day. At that moment, she gave the crowd the green light to go crazy. Everyone dancing, jumping on their feet, screaming along to the anthem of our 2020s.
Now, traveling from San Francisco, terribly far away from one of my classrooms, I step into a different one. A LOUD, multi-media experience by an experimental artist, in the very organized and calm environment that is Stockholm, on the very last stop of the Euro tour.
“We are going to celebrate tonight”, the performer setting the tone.
And here I am, jumping up and down, engaged and enthralled in her fabulously created, coded, of self-mirage discovery.
I feel as though my intoxication with prose allows me to subsidize her created experiential world into text when in reality, no aspect of the Ultrasound tour can be distilled into anything less than the physical mystery of X-rays, waveforms, sonic distortion, and mega fist pumping.
Further, the amalgamation of her band, a bunch of scrappy young artists oozing cool factor of nonchalant IDGAF stage presence, allows Lorde’s both chaotic and calm self journey to exist on the backdrop of her ever evolving and changing relationship to her own youth.
In her super powered Ultrasound tour, Lorde doesn’t even have to shush. Her lyricism, stage presence, and overall connectivity to the audience makes the experience hyper-personal, in a way an American in Stockholm could simply never forget.
Text: Jane Hatfield
Featured press photos: Thistle Brown
Check out or photos and review of Lorde’s show at Lollapalooza Stockholm 2022
