Lorde is growing up. Her fans are, too.

Twelve years after she became an international sensation at age 16, Lorde returned to Philadelphia Tuesday night — older, more self-aware, and ready to reflect.

“I really feel the passing of time,” said Lorde, the 28-year-old alternative-pop star from New Zealand, addressing fans at Philly’s Xfinity Mobile Arena Tuesday night for her “Ultrasound” tour.

“I’m 28 now. I was 16 when I made it ,” she continued, as the opening beats of “Liability,” a Melodrama-era ballad about being “a little much” for everyone, built in the background. “We’ve really grown up together. I feel that. You’ve seen me through a lot of stages, and you’ve been patient, and you’ve let me become myself.”

For Lorde and many of her fans, getting older was the driving mantra of the packed show in South Philly.

Once a ragtag group of defiant teens, Lorde’s fan base has officially entered adulthood. Songs about underage drinking and yearning to escape suburbia have been supplanted by ones of bodily autonomy, self-examination, and alienation from one’s youth. As groups of mostly 20-somethings poured into the Xfinity Mobile Arena Tuesday night, many said their own nostalgia brought them to the concert as much as Lorde’s new album did.

“Once you are the age that she wrote the album is when you really get it, and it all clicks,” said Jon Mishra, 20, who came to the show with his two best friends from Temple University.

“She’s very much a nostalgia act,” said Chanina Wong, 27, who showed up with her sister. “That’s what breeds her longevity.”

As Lorde moved seamlessly between tracks and eras of her life last night, she was confident, capturing the audience’s imagination with few bells and whistles. Emerging from a trapdoor as lasers pulsed and the synthetic intro to “Hammer” built, the singer was met with an adoring audience. She moved from “Hammer” into “Royals,” the 2013 single that made her a star, then to “Broken Glass,” a synth track from Virgin about “punching the mirror” to shake herself free of an eating disorder.

This was not the singer’s first rodeo in Philadelphia. She played the Mann Center during her Pure Heroine Tour in 2014, then upgraded to the Xfinity Mobile Arena (then the Wells Fargo Center) for Melodrama in 2018. In 2022, she played a cozier gig at the Met Philadelphia during her "Solar Power" tour.

Her command of the arena stage last night was perhaps a reflection of the MDMA and psilocybin therapy she did between 2022 and 2024 to help cure her crippling stage fright. She told Rolling Stone that the therapy helped her experience “the ooze,” or the act of “letting herself take up more space in everything she does.” Last night, her head thrashes and hip gyrations were met with cheers from the audience, who seemed captivated by her slightly erratic, yet endearing, dance moves.

She wore ripped jeans and a blue tee held together with silver duct tape — a motif central to the album’s aesthetic and Lorde’s gender expression. Over the course of the night, she slowly undressed to a pair of Calvin Klein boxers and eventually took off her T-shirt, revealing just a slim strip of duct tape covering her chest.

“We’ve got a lot to catch up on. It’s been a minute, you know?” she said early on in the show.

Lorde and her fans did, in fact, have a lot to catch up on.

Her first album, Pure Heroine, released in 2013, catapulted her into stardom. Melodrama, released in 2017, made her a household name among teens and young adults.

In 2013, “Royals” made her the youngest artist to earn a No. 1 single in the U.S. since Tiffany in 1987. In 2014, it won her two Grammys. In its review of Pure Heroine, Pitchfork called Lorde “a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom.”

Melodrama debuted No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 chart and was nominated for album of the year at the 2018 Grammys. With the album, The Guardian said Lorde proved “adept at chronicling the messy entanglements you invariably encounter in your late teens and early 20s.” She joined the pantheon of female pop artists like Charli XCX and Taylor Swift, selling out arenas and working with the ubiquitous pop music producer Jack Antonoff.

Her third album, Solar Power, a lighter, more acoustic collection complete with criticisms of California and wellness culture, was not so well received. Pitchfork called the music “drab.” The Independent said it was “sun-bleached of melody.”

Unbeknownst to fans, Lorde had fallen into the throes of an eating disorder as she was promoting Solar Power. As she told Rolling Stone this spring, self-loathing and obsessions with thinness had taken over her life by the end of 2023. At the same time, her nearly decade-long relationship with music executive Justin Warren was falling apart. At the end of that year, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15 and was subsequently diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric ­—isorder, a severe premenstrual syndrome that includes extreme sadness and fatigue, before getting an IUD.

During that post-Solar Power hiatus, she lived in New York City, moving quietly through the city and doing psychedelic therapy. She wrote Virgin from New York, collaborating primarily with producer and writer Jim-E Stack, who has worked with Bon Iver, Caroline Polachek, and Danielle Haim.

She read extensively about pregnancy and the human body — themes reflected in both the lyrics and the album art of Virgin, which chronicles her transition into adulthood. In “Clearblue,” a somber and synthetic ballad, Lorde sings about crying during sex and taking a pregnancy test.

On Tuesday, the crowd went wild for both new and old material. “Supercut,” a standout track off Melodrama about reliving memories from an old relationship, was a hit. Fans bounced up and down synchronously, belting the lyrics “Cause in my head, in my head, I do everything right. When you call, I’ll forgive and not fight.” Lorde sang part of the song while running on a treadmill.

When she pulled out “Oceanic Feeling” and “Big Star,” two slower tracks off Solar Power, she lost some of the crowd’s attention, a reminder of the album’s mixed-reception. Yet she was able to pull the audience back quickly with “Liability.”

The show was mostly apolitical, save for a moment when Lorde said she’s “scared a lot of the time” and told fans, “we need [love] more than ever.” She later ripped off her shirt’s duct tape to reveal the words “women’s political caucus.”

Lorde’s endearing weirdness had its moments, too. Throughout the night, cameras livestreamed video clips including close-up shots of Lorde’s belly button and the inside of one dancer’s mouth. At another point, the same dancer ate an apple on stage, which was broadcast to the big screen.

Like many artists, Lorde’s canon has been revisited in the age of viral TikToks.

In 2014, the year after Pure Heroine debuted, two songs, “Team” and “Royals,” landed on the Billboard Hot 100 list. “Ribs” and “A World Alone,” last night’s encores and crowd favorites, didn’t make the cut at the time. But the capricious nature of internet virality has given “Ribs” a new life, landing it on the Top 100 this past May. Last night, the arena vibrated as young fans bounced to the lyrics of Ribs: “You’re the only friend I need, sharing beds like little kids, and laughing ‘til our ribs get tough, but that will never be enough.”

After the show, fans trickled out the venue dressed in denim, miniskirts, concert T-shirts, and duct tape. They hugged, cried, and took selfies for Instagram. At each tumultuous juncture of their adolescent lives, there was Lorde, handing them an antidote to their suffering in the form of raw, passionate pop music.

Here’s the set list for Lorde’s “Ultrasound Tour” at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia on Sept. 30, 2025.

“Hammer”

“Royals”

“Broken Glass”

“Buzzcut Season”

“Favourite Daughter”

“Perfect Places”

“Shapeshifter”

“Current Affairs”

“Supercut”

“No Better”

“GRWM”

“The Louvre”

“Oceanic Feeling”

“Big Star”

“Liability”

“Clearblue”

“Man of the Year”

“If She Could See Me Now”

“Team”

“What Was That”

“Green Light”

“David”

Encore:

“A World Alone”

“Ribs”