shhh!

Lorde Shushed Y’all Once, and She’d Do It Again

Photo: John Shearer/Getty Images

Bet she’d rue the day she shushed a fandom in the dark, but Lorde has no regrets about her substitute-teacher approach to the pop-concert experience. On April 23, the Instagram account “@lordecontent” shared a video of the Solar Power artist rolling over in bed to host a miniature press conference about “this thing of me shushing people at my shows,” referring to a now-viral TikTok compilation of the singer quite literally shushing the crowd at her concerts as they sing along to her 2017 song “Writer in the Dark.” Something about the sound cutting out and Lorde holding up her hands to quiet everyone as she sings is so unsettlingly funny, especially watching her do it back-to-back-to-back for over a minute in a succession of outfits. She looks like a middle-school choir conductor who has had it up to here with the class today.

“That’s something that I did during one of my songs a couple of times when I wanted to sing it a cappella and/or off the microphone so people could hear me and because I wanted to try something different,” says Lorde in her explanation video. “If you come to my shows, you know it’s like an hour and a half of all of us singing and screaming together. Also, that dramatic-ass move was literally for an album called Melodrama, so don’t stress too hard.”

Lorde Shushed Y’all Once, and She’d Do it Again