LIVE REVIEW: Lorde @ UWM Panther Arena

WORDS and Pictures BY SOLEIL RUMPIT

There is nothing chaste about Lorde’s 2025 album, Virgin, or the way she brings it to life onstage. As her most intriguing project, in my opinion, the title was likely based on its Greek origin, meaning unattached to a man – one-in-herself, independently complete. Virgin is almost entirely distinct from the modern connotation of sexual “purity.” This album, and the era as a whole, reclaims the concept of virginity from its false, moralistic baggage, instead grounding it autonomy, curiosity, and transformation. Her October 10th Milwaukee stop of the Ultrasound World Tour, rooted in this idea of introspection, erupted as a sleek and visionary performance that melted the confines of femininity and her past stage identities. I was granted witness, at center barricade, to the phoenixlike resurrection of our one Lorde and Savior.

Even before the lights dimmed, the buzzing anticipation of the Milwaukee audience was undeniable. The UWM Panther Arena is a rare site for concerts and the rows of empty seats in low-visibility sections can feel repressive, but they went largely unnoticed with such an engaged, animated crowd. It helped to have two talented and charming opening acts, the first being R&B/pop singer-songwriter Empress Of who played a bouncy set ending with Best to You, a Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) collaboration. British artist Amber Bain, known by her alt/dream pop solo project, The Japanese House, took the stage next playing several of her indie hits including I Saw You in a Dream and Touching Yourself, backed by a standout saxophone performance from Cicely Cotton.

The crowd and the opening acts fed off each other’s energy, rarely faltering in momentum as the minutes ticked down to our headliner. Promptly at nine, Lorde made her appearance against a blinding silver-blue laser beam. Looking back at rows of arms outstretched toward her ascent, it was impossible to ignore the religious parallels. She is, after all, kinda like a prettier Jesus.

Hammer, the leading track on Virgin, served as the opener to this past Friday’s dazzling show. Lorde rose slowly from the stage floor with the pulsating, synth-driven intro and the crowd lit up in flames of adoration. Church was in session. Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man / I might have been born again, she sang as the tension built until it was almost tangible. The themes of unrestrained gender expression and a resistance to binary absolutes were present throughout her show; Lorde is both man and woman, sacred and profane, in love and brokenhearted. When the post-chorus hit, it really did land with a visceral force of a hammer. Simultaneously soft and gritty, this song is quintessential Lorde to me and it was a perfect catalyst for the transformative journey she was leading us into.

“It’s really fucking good to be here,” Lorde said to the crowd after a sharp and unembellished performance of her 2013 hit Royals, “We have a lot to catch up on, Milwaukee.” It was her first time in the city in seven years, last visiting for the kickoff of her North American Melodrama tour leg at the now-demolished BMO Harris Bradley Center. This evening, country artist Brandon Lake played right across the street at the Bradley Center-successor, Fiserv Forum. Milwaukeeans passing by before the show might have imagined a turf-war tension rising outside as girls in rhinestones and cowboy boots walked by lines of Doc Martens and DIY duct tape tube tops. But it was all smiles.

Lorde ended the first act with Favourite Daughter leading into Perfect Places, which was rather sadistic but so beautifully devastating it must have bound the audience to her and to each other for the rest of the evening. Lorde is a storyteller, and her concert visuals were modest but captivatingly effective. Cool, metallic tones dominated the performance with light and shadow doing much of the heavy lifting. The stage was relatively simple, with the few props she used being giant pieces of tech: a fan, a treadmill, and a towering sound system in the background. Her two vaguely androgynous backup dancers were performers in their own right, moving asynchronously across the floor. They seemed to interpret both the sounds and their own impulses, responding spontaneously as physical manifestations of the music. It was over ninety minutes of entwined visual and auditory expression that surpassed anything I’ve witnessed from a live pop performance before.

Shapeshifter propelled the themes of perpetual self-exploration and change, with lyrics underlining her ability, or curse, to constantly mold the shape of herself, especially to fit into relationships. Supercut was another emotionally-charged number as she began singing from the stage floor, lying on her back in just a t-shirt and briefs, then ending in a sprint on the oversized treadmill, reflecting the dramatic release from a relationship. Lorde took a pause after giving the most evocative HIIT cardio routine ever, and catching her breath, used the moment to connect with her fans.

“We’re in this room because we dream the same dreams, and we believe the same stories, and there’s just something about that,” she said, voice carrying through the silent, spellbound arena, “Look around, these people will take care of you. These are your people. Isn’t that so beautiful?”

Lorde referenced her home country of Aotearoa before singing the summery, enlightened Oceanic Feeling and gave a heartfelt performance of Sad Girl anthem, Liability. Sonically, it’s hard not to miss the stripped, minimally produced sets that her earlier tours were known for. The entire concept of Virgin is based on vulnerability, rebirth, and self-acceptance. It seems represented explicitly by both her tour title and the x-ray scan of her pelvis featured on the album cover, presenting her bare bones, organs, her IUD to the world – all unconcealed even beneath a layer of clothing. Relying on obvious backing tracks, not just instrumentation and harmonies but main vocal melodies as well, felt disingenuous to this album (although it’s hard to name any mainstream pop artist who doesn’t). Lorde sang every song live, to be clear, but at times the audio overproduction shifted into what felt more like a listening party than a showcase of her raw vocal talent.

The concert did, however, show off Lorde’s ability to command a stage through erratic, instinctual movements, testing the boundaries of her body in real time. She stripped off her jeans and shoes and sprinted back and forth across the floor. She collapsed then ascended on a rising pedestal. She climbed a giant prop soundsystem and lit a flare above her head for The Louvre. She smeared silver glitter to her elbows and feet and then poured water down her throat from her iconic holographic bottle. She wrapped her breasts in duct tape and became Man of the Year. Move, change, sob, laugh, slow down, start up – when everything and nothing feels right, Lorde says be everything and be nothing. Lorde’s Milwaukee performance, especially physically, was fluid and free, a captivating imagination of her new album’s sound.

And it wasn’t just Virgin that had its time in the spotlight. Songs that may once have been grungy love ballads or restless teen angst hits are now framed as meditations on self-possession and personal transformation. No Better, while very rhythmic and fast-paced, was performed with a steady, deliberate voice that reflected contentment more than urgency. Both Team and Green Light were clearly crowd favorites as I’m sure many of us had come of age to their lyrics of frenzied yearning and nostalgia. At recent shows she introduced Team with a dedication to Palestine, though for this set she let the colors of the flag speak for themselves as the red, white, and green light bathed the stage. Certain moments made it easy to imagine Lorde singing back to her younger self, not to mourn her, but to thank her for surviving long enough to become someone new and unbreakable.

“This means something. Being in this room and feeling these collective explosions of joy, and pain, and loneliness – the ecstasy and the agony,” Lorde spoke, “This makes us stronger, somehow able to go out there and do the rest of the shit we gotta do. And I just wanna say that I’m so grateful that you’ve continued to place that trust in me, that you’ve continued to press play.”

Finally, three of her strongest and most vulnerable pieces from Virgin – Man of the Year, What Was That, and David, helped close out the show. Her exploration of gender and sexuality reached its climax with the resounding I don’t belong to anyone sung underneath slow strobing spotlights. Like Michelangelo’s David, she had been carved into her pure, human form through a long and painful and beautiful journey that had brought her there to us on that night.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Lorde concert without an earthshattering performance of Ribs, for which she emerged for the final time on the B-stage. From what I could tell, every person knew every word and no one held back, including Lorde. It was a completely cathartic, unifying encore that immersed the audience in both the ache of growing up and the satisfaction of becoming someone they’re proud to be, someone who can live and survive it all. Emotions were at their peak. The boundary between artist and audience had long collapsed. It felt like a collective awakening, a realization of our own capacity for change, for becoming something fuller and freer than before. Lorde reached up to the laser beam curtain above her head, fracturing the light with her fingertips. With a final thank you to the crowd, our elusive Savior vanished back into the dark.

But barely an hour later, I found myself standing face to face with her. The handful of us who lingered after the show, half to steady ourselves after almost two hours in her orbit and half out of sheer hope, were lucky enough to share a moment with Lorde. Braving the cold Wisconsin air, she stepped out of her tour bus in a jacket and sweats, snacks in hand. And she wasn’t Christ – she was a young, happily exhausted, real-life human named Ella.

“They gave me this bag of regional popcorn,” She told us, “It’s dill!” Of course, she had us pass it around and try. If you had told tween-age me that I would one day be sharing dill-flavored popcorn with Lorde in a Milwaukee parking lot at midnight, I would have laughed and written a textpost tagged #asif. But there I was, exactly. We spoke about her home city of Auckland, Aotearoa, where I had lived for three years, the angst and adoration she poured into What Was That and, naturally, the approach of Scorpio season (her twenty-ninth birthday being a few weeks away). She was so kind and disarmingly perceptive. After an evening that had felt mythic in scope, where I had dissolved into light and been reformed again, this small, unguarded moment brought me back to earth. Sometimes transformation is a return. Sometimes I’m reminded that nothing is fixed, that I can choose to meet myself over and over, that I can even start new without leaving anything behind. That night, I might have been born again.