It's always been easy to be cynical about the vapid state of popular music; it's harder to explain how a sparse, down-beat brand of nuanced indie-electro can fill stadiums all over the world. But that's exactly what 17-year-old New Zealander Lorde is doing.
A subdued light-show; minimal theatrics; unfiltered projections of skeletal trees and bleak, snow-covered suburban landscapes; and no props, no dancers, barely a single costume change. This is by no means Mickey Mouse Club, yet remains a pop cultural phenomenon. Is it time we started trusting young people with popular taste? Has online youth evolved at such a pace that their newest deity is every bit mature and sophisticated as the best "adult contemporary" offerings? Or is Lorde a simple aberration — a kind of post-Bieber market correction?
Ella Yelich-O'Connor's positioning of herself and her music as the antithesis of pop celebrity is sometimes dismissed as affectation (the affluent North Shore suburb of Devonport in New Zealand isn't exactly a "torn-up town"), but where a few cynics see heavy-handedness, most find a brash simplicity that doesn't rely on the usual pop tropes of over-earnest heartbreak or nouveau-riche swagger.
Besides this, it's hard to be cynical about a raven-haired girl from Takapuna Grammar School making frantic shapes inside a billowing, windswept gold lamé robe. Add a thousand-odd teenagers, shower everything in confetti, and all those pop prejudices evaporate into pure, un-self-conscious pink light.
Her show at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre starts with the husky vocals of Glory and Gore. Four bars in and the stage curtain lifts, revealing keyboardist Jimmy Mac and drummer Ben Barter hammering out the swelling, synth-laden chorus. Teen hysteria ensues, followed — amazingly — by a stripped-back, subdued cover of The Replacements' Swingin' Party, complete with warm synth chords and a muted, amniotic electro-pulse.
The live version of a collaboration with New York alt Hip-Hop star Son Lux results in a sort of deconstructed cabaret number, all scattered percussion and rich tuba samples, as if those oft-cited shades of Portishead couldn't get any darker.
"Oh, and if your phone has a light you should turn it on now," she quips. The crowd obeys at once. There's something good about a sea of smartphones held aloft like cigarette lighters – wholesome, optimistic, altogether toothsome in a way that Lana Del Ray isn't.
Towards the end of the set she commences a rambling apology – the tour had been postponed from April due to ill health – that leads into a recollection of a house party that had somehow introduced the prospect of her adulthood. Muted chords throb as the singer reminisces, and a thousand teens are engrossed. They're suddenly ecstatic when the story turns out to be the genesis of Ribs, a dusky anthem shot through with another muffled dance beat, this time tempered with nostalgic vocal harmonies, all exquisitely sampled, all perfectly Shazam-able.
Nostalgia gives way to the hip-hop finger-clicks of Royals, towards the end of which that gold lamé is donned in preparation for Team. It's a neat one-two, brought home by a burst of confetti, each piece ingeniously stamped with a stylised portrait, one of the few theatrical elements in a largely unembellished show.
Not exactly austere — events incorporating personalised confetti rarely are — but still a sound argument for live pop music that doesn't rely completely on spectacle or sensation.
• Lorde plays the Hordern Pavilion, Sydney on July 11 and 12; July 15 and 16 at Festival Hall, Melbourne; July 19 at Newcastle Entertainment Centre and July 20 at Riverstage, Brisbane Botanic Gardens
