Last night, Lorde brought chaotic brat energy to her Tāmaki Makaurau hometown, teasing some kind of pop-up event through cryptic WhatsApp messages. It was later revealed that she was performing five songs for small groups of fans - inside the bathrooms of the YMCA in the city.

The evening unfolded live in our fun Substack chat, moving from speculation over the location, to collective disappointment as most of us didn’t get invites, to elation when one reader made it inside. Here, two of them report from both inside and outside Lorde’s tiny Love Club at the Y.

Outside, with Tom Nordmeier

Lorde, our Kiwi icon, posting an Instagram story with just the text “Auckland” and a link to her WhatsApp number teased a hope that I’d had after seeing her intimate events with fans in New York and Sydney – that she might come back to her hometown and do something similar.

The WhatsApp number itself produced only automated responses: after signing up through the received link, not much info was given. Later she sent a follow up message: “Auckland I wanna play you something .. Meet me in the city tonight?”

Through other sources – a few different Instagram stories, Ensemble’s Substack group chat – I later gleaned that some lucky (by some reports as few as 45) fans who had replied “keen” received an invite for themselves and a plus one.

Rumours were swirling! Could she be doing a public performance of her new song like she did in New York? A meet and greet, perhaps?

Further sleuthing revealed she would probably be at the YMCA in Auckland Central. This had us thinking: “YMCA? More like Y would she be there?”. One Ensemble patron had theorised some sort of sporting location that would fit with the title of her soon-to-be-released song Man of the Year, so in this context, it seemed to make sense. 

By 8pm I had received no invite. Sobbing emoji. But as a huge Lorde fan since 2013, when her songs Team and Tennis Court were played to quadruple platinum status on my iPod Nano, I was determined nonetheless. 

At 8:30pm, I arrived at the YMCA to find a large crowd of 150-200 people outside. The exhilaration, the anticipation, the hope of seeing Lorde tonight was thick in the air. 

Watching those few lucky people get name-checked and await entry on the stairs made me very envious. I could only imagine that feeling of luck and excitement to be able to spend half an hour with Lorde and her incredible music. 

There were multiple groups at different intervals: 8:00pm, 8:45pm, 9:30pm. Each time the next group was called forward, the crowd became borderline feral – the desperation of wanting to get in rippling through the group, followed by the disappointment of not being able to, all underscored by the lingering hope that there would be more luck with the next intake. After the 9:30pm group, the bouncers let everyone know there would be no more shows.

That didn’t deter the majority of the crowd, as we wanted to at least catch a glimpse of Lorde, hoping she’d come out to greet us.

In the end, she slipped out of the same entrance the lucky fans of Lorde’s Love Club had entered, and while all but two of us in the crowd had been duped by a fake getaway van at another entrance, she slinked into a second van that had materialised under the hazy orange glow of the street lights.

Inside, with Matthew McAuley

In writing this, I’ve realised that it’s actually kind of hard to explain last night – it happened so quickly, and with so little preamble, that I didn’t really have time to prime myself for what was coming or how I should receive it. And even if I did have more notice, it wasn’t until the bathroom attendant opened the doors and we filed past a row of cubicles (two open, two locked, one holding the artist and one her soundsystem) that I really had any idea of what was actually going on.

What it felt like, in the moment and on reflection, was a kind of amalgam: a meet-and-greet via listening party, with brief sidebars into artist statement and personal history. Singing unamplified as she moved through the 30-strong crowd, she shared a handful of new songs – Virgin lead single What Was That and the about-to-release Man of the Year, as well as Current Affairs and Broken Glass from the album – plus fan favourite / early-2010s emotional time capsule / first-album permaclassic Ribs.

I should probably note here that all of the new material sounds quite incredible – thick, rolling sub-bass, rattling percussion and screaming synth leads, like Robyn doing Fever Ray – and that on top of that, from word one of ‘MotY’ it’s even more immediately obvious that her Virgin-era pen is sharper + surer than it’s maybe ever been. But as special as it was to hear those songs in some of their first airings outside of her inner circle, it didn’t feel like the music was really the point.

Again, what it felt like was an artist who was ready to acknowledge that she’s been through a lot, and who now wanted to share that she’s on the other side of something. An artist who in that process has become even more acutely aware of where she’s come from, and of how her extremely singular experience has shaped her views of the world, of herself, of those who she shares her life with, of those who look up to her.

An artist who wanted to give a handful of people from her hometown – some whose lives probably closely mirror her own pre-superstardom years, some who are 37-year-old men who almost missed the whole thing because they were reading their kid a bedtime story – an opportunity to experience not just what these songs sound like, but what this whole thing feels like for her: as Lorde the pop star, but also as Ella the person.

When I got home, I felt completely wired. The knowledge of having been party to something that was the subject of so much desperate curiosity but was so hermetic, so well-guarded, was deeply disorientating. Scrolling online in search of a scene report from someone else – something I could map to and compare against my own recollections of a thing I still wasn’t quite sure had actually happened – I found a screen-recorded capture of an Instagram Live which had been posted to Lorde’s account during one of the three 'sessions'.

Watching the clip, it took me a while to realise that I was actually viewing a third-person perspective of what I’d experienced a few hours earlier – standing immediately next to the video's subject, hiding under a heavy hood and heavier jacket, that was me. The video is dark and blurry, because even in the room it was dark and blurry, but later in the night I someone else share a screengrab of a moment when the strobes had flashed.

In that frame, Lorde is of course the focal point: with ‘Man of the Year’ cresting the apex of its incredible crescendo, her arms are cradled above her head, our artist smiling and singing with her eyes closed.

It’s less perceptible – and certainly of negligible historic importance to anyone other than myself – but in that frame I can see my own wide-eyed grin too. My general recollections are kind of hazy, but in that moment I know exactly what I knew: that I was watching an artist unencumbered by even a trace of doubt or insecurity, sure in the sense that she had arrived at a place she’s been trying to find for as long as she’s been writing. I feel deeply privileged to have been there for it. I hope I remember how it felt forever.