Lorde Defends Shushing Fans Onstage After Melodrama Tour Video Goes Viral: 'Don't Stress Too Hard'

Arturo Holmes/Getty Lorde

Lorde is clarifying the origins of her recent viral moment.

After a supercut video featuring many clips of the 25-year-old musician instructing her audience to quiet down before performing the chilling ballad "Writer in the Dark" from 2017's Melodrama went viral on social media, Lorde offered an explanation to fans over the weekend.

The "Solar Power" singer, who rarely uses social media herself, released a video via the Instagram account @lordecontent to speak on the matter. "OK, I just woke up. I just wanted to talk about this thing of me shushing people at my shows," Lorde said from her bed, eye mask still on her face. "That was something I did in that one song, a couple of times, when I wanted to sing it a capella and/or off the microphone so people could hear me and because I wanted to try something different."

"If you come to my shows, you know it's like an hour and a half of all of us singing and screaming together," she continued. "Also, that dramatic ass move was literally for an album called Melodrama, so don't stress too hard."

While the viral clip included videos from Lorde's Melodrama World Tour, the musician is currently performing shows on her Solar Power Tour, which is hitting venues worldwide from now until March 2023. The now-infamous video of her "shushing" crowds went viral last week, prompting backlash from some social media users.

"Nah this is so EMBARRASSING imagine shushing the crowd only so they can hear the worst vocal performance of all time I'm shaking you guys," read one tweet posted alongside the mash-up video.

However, others came to the musician's defense. "lorde created melodrama (2017) and for that i personally think shes allowed to shush people at concerts whenever she wants," wrote another Twitter user.

Following the clip's viral run, Lorde performed "Writer in the Dark" for the first time since 2018 during her show at The Chicago Theater in Chicago, Illinois on April 23, and she spoke about the online conversation before singing the song.

"The internet has decided that this was very bad and very rude. I think they mustn't have come to one of these shows because, you know, it's such a communal vibe. We're all singing and screaming all the time," she told the crowd ahead of the performance. "But I think occasionally there are moments for silence, and there are moments for sound. There are moments that belong to just one person, and there are moments that are all of ours, and that's just life."

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"But I had a weird moment with it. I was like, 'Huh, I've been misunderstood,' and I was sitting there this morning having gone on the internet, and I was like, 'Ugh, people don't get me,'" continued Lorde. "Then I thought about the room of people I was going to be hanging out with on this saturday night in Chicago… I know what's important, you know? We're fine."

"So I'm going to sing this song. I haven't sung it since 2018, and all I ask of you is to sing this as loudly as you'd like, so we can show the f—ing trolls what it sounds like," concluded her speech.