Lorde at Glastonbury 2025 review: enchanting secret set earmarks beginning of Lorde Summer
Lorde at Glastonbury 2025 review: can Patchwork beat this? ★★★★
When Lorde is on stage, she adopts the kind of sultry pout that looks as if she’s thinking “f*ck you*. But this morning, the first full day of Glastonbury 2025 coincided with the launch of her new album Virgin, and behind the looks-could-kill poise, she insisted she was delighted to be here. “This is crazy for me,” she said. “This is the release, I’m releasing it right now.”
Glastonbury’s boiling hot Woodsies tent appeared to induce at least one health scare during the 28-year-old New Zealander’s performance, the first of the secret sets from across the weekend (others are rumoured to be Chappell Roan and Pulp). But Lorde rewarded those who’d been queuing since before 9am with an intense performance coupling best-in-class vocals with her charming free-spirited choreography as she delivered the new LP front to back. Perhaps the moody looks were because her baggy jeans and top were clearly sweltering – she spent most of the set tucking her t-shirt into her bra to allay the heat.
In a Lorde set, the androgynous choreography is as much of a captivating force as the music: her catalogue of unusual dancing includes one move where she looks like someone running on a tread mill into the floor; it’s a brilliantly weird concoction of body contortions that suggest she’s truly wrapped up in the music.
Lorde at Glastonbury 2025: New Zealander wows with sweaty first day secret set
Lorde has been away for a while. It seemed like maybe she’d retreated permanently when in 2022 the 28-year-old, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, revealed she’d been experiencing an eating disorder. The singer who rose in 2013 with her track Royals couldn’t find the same cultural cut through with her third record released in 2021, but comments about the beginning of a ‘Lorde Summer’ from the 7,000 people streaming the Glastonbury set live on Instagram sum up how comfily she fits back into the zeitgeist.
The songs from Virgin hold up. The 12-track album, her first in nearly four years, is a swell of emotionally-charged synth-pop. Tracks like What Was That, Man of the Year and Hammer tackle issues like body image and gender identity and mark a return to the formula of her most famous tracks: there’s clear depth, but they’re commercially viable enough that they’re earworms on the first listen.
Singing from a Woodsies stage covered in what appeared to be the sort of plastic material placed on office floors during fitouts, perhaps Lorde wants an industrial reset. Closing on Green Light, her seminal banger from summer 2017, you wonder which of these new tunes will be this summer’s: What Was That already has over 80 million streams on Spotify and deserves to go much further.
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