Lorde has never played the traditional pop star game, so when you roll up to the Ultrasound Tour, don’t expect a fleet of dancers facing the crowd and executing synchronous, symmetrical moves. Instead, the stipped-down, emotionally bare nature of the show is augmented by a select few dancers doing expressive, sporadic choreography — more Pina Bausch than pop. At one point, a dancer turns their back to the audience and runs their hands along their body, while another sits on the edge of the stage, bobbing their head, a mixture of extroversion and introversion befitting Lorde.

The album that took up the least amount of setlist space was Solar Power, which might be unconventional given that it’s the most recent LP Lorde dropped before Virgin. But the sunny, beachy project has long felt like the biggest left turn in the musician’s oeuvre — especially knowing now how Lorde was privately battling an eating disorder behind the Solar Power era’s cultivated tranquility — making it hard to reconcile with the unflinching brutality of Virgin.

But the two back-to-back songs from Solar Power that did make it, carefully selected by Lorde, remain some of the album’s most honest moments — and that’s exactly what Virgin is all about. By choosing “Oceanic Feeling,” an ode to Lorde’s native New Zealand, and “Big Star,” a delicate lullaby about her late dog, the musician beautifully demonstrated in the context of the Ultrasound Tour’s storytelling how essential her third album is to her arc, despite its differences from the rest of her catalog. There wouldn’t be Virgin without Solar Power.

The most poignant part of the brief Solar Power set came as Lorde reflected on her own growth while reminding fans that they’ve come a long way, too. “Now the cherry-black lipstick’s gathering dust in a drawer, I don’t need her anymore,” she sang on “Oceanic Feeling” before prompting fans to finish the lyric.

“‘Cause I got this power,” they screamed back.

There are moments during the Ultrasound World Tour that are simply so effective in their minimalism and emotional impact that it’s jaw-dropping; “Current Affairs” is one of them. Shimmying out of her pants while singing the pained, wounded lyrics, Lorde lies down and writhes around on the floor as the platform beneath her rises up, elevating and exposing the sensual, sad performance.  

“Making this album, I really tried to tell the truth,” Lorde told the rapt MSG crowd at one point. “I do not lie on Virgin. I don’t even dramatize. Everything is exactly as it was for me. Everything is as plain and raw as possible. The older I get I think that’s where the magic is. It’s incredible to me I made this extremely plain, raw, rugged album and put it next to the three albums preceding it and that is the reason we’re here together in this room. It’s not to do with me, it’s to do with you. I can’t make a story live forever — you can. And it inspires me to keep trying to peel off a layer, to show you what’s underneath. I trust now you know exactly what to do with it.”

Acknowledging that sometimes you gotta “laugh at yourself,” Lorde trotted out a hip-hop-influenced song she released in 2013, “No Better.” “This is a ridiculous song I wrote when I was 14 and it’s impossible to sing,” she laughed. “I need your help.” A small but vocal segment of the audience who recognized the tune lost their minds, whipping out their phones and singing along as Lorde traipsed across the stage, airing out a song she hadn’t done live since 2014 prior to this tour.

Sweeping and intensely emotional, “David” was always bound to be a sacred Virgin favorite among diehard fans — but thanks to creator Anthony Haynes, the song reached a wider audience on TikTok after he started posting videos of himself listening to it underneath the flashing lights of New York City subway platforms.

Lorde initially met up with Haynes in July to appear in one of those subway videos, and on Wednesday night they reunited for one of the most special moments of the musician’s MSG show. Walking off stage and straight into the pit, Lorde found Haynes in the crowd and sang the song with him, the pair staring straight into a handheld camera that projected the live footage onto big screens — a real-time recreation of their video together.

Haynes stayed at her side throughout the remainder of the show, getting fans pumped up and dancing along as the singer performed a two-song encore on a B-stage in the back of the arena.

Lorde may be 12 years and four albums deep into her career, but she still decided to close out her triumphant show at NYC’s most famed venue with two songs she wrote back when she was barely a teenager: “A World Alone” and “Ribs” from Pure Heroine.

After cutting through the crowd and making her way to the very back of the arena, the singer hopped on top of a small platform and performed the emotional tracks in the center of thousands of fans, each getting as physically close to her as possible. At no point in the show was the crowd louder than while singing “Ribs,” with Lorde and her fans screaming, “You’re the only friend I need” back and forth to one another over and over — and really meaning it, too.

The best part of the encore, though, was when Lorde encouraged nearby fans: “Come up here! Get in close, who gives a f–k?”

“They’re OK, they’re OK!” she then assured security guards who tried to interfere, telling the crowd, “They don’t know what we have.”