Lorde Brings ‘Virgin’ Home With Ultrasound Tour Stop at Madison Square Garden: 7 Best Moments

The star crafted much of her latest album in NYC. At MSG, the music finally came home.


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As she says on Virgin closer “David,” which she performed to a sold-out Madison Square Garden on Wednesday (Oct. 1) night, Lorde doesn’t belong to anyone — but if her fourth studio album did have a home, it would be New York City.

Not only did the Kiwi pop star — fresh off of a devastating heartbreak and in the trenches of gender discovery and body-image issues — craft much of Virgin with producer Jim-E Stack after relocating to NYC four years ago, she also channeled the city’s energy into every facet of the album. Lead single “What Was That” features a reference to Brooklyn venue Baby’s All Right, while “If She Could See Me Now” calls back to ancient horses “running up Prince Street” downtown. And when it came time to promote Virgin, Lorde made her TikTok debut with a video of herself walking through Washington Square Park in the West Village, which would later become the site of a frenetic music video shoot costarring a swarm of fans.

With all of that in mind, the singer’s Ultrasound World Tour stop at MSG felt like nothing short of a homecoming show (even if Lorde is actually from New Zealand). With a setlist spanning the songs on Virgin as well as all three of her previous albums — Pure Heroine (2013), Melodrama (2017) and Solar Power (2021) — the Grammy winner brilliantly synthesized all of her past lives into one cohesive story on stage. Laser lights, live camera footage on the big screens and a minimalistic set free of any dressings beyond a symbolic treadmill and a large fan off to the side made for a visual aesthetic that was just as bare-bones and raw as Virgin is — something Lorde said has everything to do with the city in which it was crafted.

“I’ve been looking forward to this show obviously, but I’ve been kind of nervous, too,” she confessed over the descending piano chords of enduring Melodrama fan-favorite “Liability.” “I figured out why today — it’s because you keep me honest. I moved here in 2021. I didn’t really tell anyone what I was going to do. I just started spending a lot of time walking around this island. You probably saw me — baseball cap, big headphones, kind of muttering to myself all the time. What I found living here, and really the reason Virgin exists, is there is real beauty in stripping away the layers,” she said.

Lorde is now gearing up to spend the rest of 2025 taking her Ultrasound trek through North America and Europe, after which she’ll close out with a run of shows in New Zealand and Australia in February. Check out the best moments from her triumphant show at Madison Square Garden.

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