Gig review: Lorde at O2 Academy Leeds

“I think this is my first show in Leeds?” Ella Yelich-O’Connor – also known as Lorde – asks the 2,000-strong crowd crammed into the city’s O2 Academy. Her voice – husky in her New Zealander twang – drops another half-octave in playful fashion as she waves at them, in the palm of her hand for this theoretically pared-back European tour kick-off. “I can tell that you dressed up for me.”

There is something incongruous about one of pop’s most idiosyncratic singer-songwriters in a venue of this magnitude, but it is by design. This opening night may be the smallest on her itinerary, but whether she is an arena-ready prospect on a commercial level is moot – the choice to tackle more intimate settings is a conscious choice intended to lend itself favourably to the record she arrives behind, last year’s self-proclaimed “weed album” Solar Power. Draped in psych-folk vibes, its reinvention of Yelich-O’Connor’s musical wheel proved mutedly divisive.

Here, and amid a choregraphed three-act stage show of chillout theatricality, it ebbs and flows to ultimately charm. On a stage dominated by a rotating ladder superstructure crossed between sundial silhouette and Rapunzel-esque tower inversion, and backed by a mustard-suited band, there is little need to win over fans before first-night nerves take hold; the screams that follow opener Leader of a New Regime for Homemade Dynamite are ear-shattering.

Much of that success is rooted in the performer herself, still disarmingly adjusted a decade on from teenage breakout Pure Heroine. Part of Lorde’s pull is her earthbound charm, even if there is something a little more rehearsed these days – but there’s always a burst of spontaneity just around the corner, from the excited gestures she makes on Stoned at the Nail Salon or fretting about her deodorant after Hard Feelings.

Such assurance helps prop up woozier new material, handily supplanted by a bumper crop from superb sophomore work Melodrama, like the euphoric Supercut. With an audience primed for soaring singalongs on even the unlikeliest of new songs – California inspires as much fervour as Ribs – it is easy to forgive though, especially in a final half-hour powered by big hitters like Green Light and Tennis Court, the latter handed a first airing in almost four years.

Royals naturally closes out proceedings in an upswell of giddy infectiousness, Yelich-O’Connor’s grin reaching all the way to the back. It might be the last time she gets so close and personal.