Review and setlist: Lorde at the Met

The Met Philadelphia is a capacious space, with a stage framed by a 38-foot proscenium arch that’s big enough to fit a full-length basketball court.

But the North Broad Street opera house might feel like a cozy place if you were a 25-year-old pop star from New Zealand who was catapulted to international stardom at 16 and is seeking to regain her bearings after seeming a little lost when playing oversized arenas like the Wells Fargo Center in 2018.

That is, if you were Lorde. On Wednesday night, the singer born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor brought her Solar Power tour to the Met for a sold-out 1-hour-40-minute show built around her 2021 album of the same name.

The evening was framed as an exercise in self-care, a treasured opportunity for a voice of her generation to get back in touch with 3,400 of her closest friends and followers.

Solar Power is Lorde’s third album, after the breakout success of her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, which built a bond with her age cohort by rejecting high-gloss materialism for more substantive fulfillment, and 2017′s tormented, ecstatic Melodrama, which confirmed her talent and is her best work.

“We don’t need that kind of luxe,” Lorde sang on “Royals,” the sleek breakout hit from Pure Heroine, which she saved for the second spot in a three-song encore on Wednesday. “We crave a different kind of buzz.”

On Solar Power, that buzz is a chilled out, relaxed vibe that comes from toning down the thrashed-about electro-pop energy of Melodrama in hopes of finding a restorative sense of calm and well-being.

It’s an album about getting away from the hurly-burly of everyday life, and unplugging in pursuit of the authentic self. Like her friend Taylor Swift, with whom she shares a producer in ubiquitous New Jerseyan Jack Antonoff, Lorde put out pandemic music that embraces the natural world to connect with fans on a human scale.

At the Met, where boisterous Los Angeles indie-pop singer Remi Wolf was the opening act, Lorde’s entry music on stage was the Beatles “Sun King.”

The chief design element on stage was a giant rotating sun dial — whose arm , which I’ve learned is known as a gnomon, thanks to Lorde — also served as a staircase to the heavens in which she and the seven members of her backing ensemble (who were never introduced) were able to climb up and down.

The Solar Power songs early in the set emphasized the gotta-get-away theme. In “The Path,” she referred to herself as “born in the year of OxyContin” and as a “teen millionaire caught in the camera flash” who “won’t take the call if it’s the label or the radio.”

In the shimmery, acoustic “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” she sang, “My hot blood’s been burnin’ for several summers now / It’s time to cool it down, wherever that leads.”

(And it needs be said, she sang clear and strong all night in her just slightly raspy, full-of-character voice, showing no signs of suffering from what she termed the “horrendous laryngitis” that caused her to cancel shows last week.)

“Stoned” also include a perhaps disingenuous lyric about leaving adolescence behind and moving into the equanimity of adulthood: “All the music you loved at 16, you’ll grow out of.”

That may be true of Lorde herself, as evidenced by the Solar Power songs, on record and in performance, that leaned into handmade, non-electronic musical textures. But it’s certainly not true of her devoted fan base.

At the Met, the crowd was made up mostly of women in their mid-20s who stood throughout and sang along with zeal, particularly on songs from Pure Heroine and Melodrama, and also mimicked the star of the show’s interpretative dance moves, which mostly involve the movement of her arms.

Early on, Lorde took a seat at the base of the sun dial for some skillful, genuine-seeming stage patter, emphasizing the nine years she and her fans have been linked to one another.

She claimed to look forward to the Philadelphia date on every tour because of the passion of the audiences, and said, “You may have noticed we’re in an intimate room right now. I wanted to feel you, to see you, to hear you.”

The tricky part about building a show around the mostly subdued songs on Solar Power is that, save for the Primal Scream-like celebration of the title cut, which nods to A Tribe Called Quest with its question and answer “Can I kick it? Yeah, I can,” they are not party starters.

So in order to turn up the energy on the evening, Lorde needed to rely on more tried-and-true power sources. Those turned out to be Pure Heroine’s “Ribs,” and Melodrama’s cathartic “Green Light” and “Perfect Places,” which brought the room brilliantly to life.

The latter song led Lorde to dub the Met audience “the best singing crowd of the tour.” And for their lusty efforts, the enthusiastic crowd was rewarded with the first three-song encore the singer has played on this tour.

The added song was Pure Heroine fan favorite “400 Lux,” which preceded a version of “Royals” sung as Lorde stood in silhouette before a glowing orb, and “Team,” which resonated with a lyric that reminded performer and audience exactly where they stood with one another: “We’re on each other’s team.”

Encore