A resurfaced video of singer Lorde shushing the crowd during one of her performances has gone viral just as the Kiwi popstar kicks off her brand new world tour.
In the video, Lorde is seen singing an a capella version of her song "Writer in the Dark" at a concert in 2017. The crowd joins in with the singer, but is then "shushed" by her, who then continues on solo.
People called the the move "awkward" and "embarrassing," with some saying the performance "got really bad" after the audience stopped singing along.
Lorde broke onto the music scene in 2013 with her smash hit "Royals" when she was just 16 years old. She became the youngest female artist in 26 years to top the Billboard Hot 100 since singer-songwriter Tiffany topped the chart with her song "I Think We're Alone Now" in 1987 when she was also 16, according to the magazine.
The singer released her recent album Solar Power in 2021, the first in four years since her sophomore album Melodrama. She kicked off her current tour in Nashville on April 3, which is her first full concert since 2018, according to Rolling Stone.
Various fans have shared their take on the resurfaced footage. One TikToker, @real_lady_hands, who goes by Coco Lashar, posted footage of the show on her page late last week after seeing another video from the show. Her video has now been viewed over 9 million times.
Lashar wrote to Newsweek that the show was on June 16, 2017, at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on the day Lorde's Melodrama album was released. The show was hosted by Sirius XM for a select group of subscribers, she said, adding that although she didn't win tickets to the event, she went to the venue anyway and was able to get in.
Lashar said she feels bad about the reaction the video has received.
Her video has received over 30,000 comments since she first posted it, with many people critiquing Lorde's performance in the clip especially after the audience relented.
"What in the WORLD...," one commenter wrote.
"This video makes me noticeably nauseous," another wrote.
Others, however, justified the move, with one writing that the moment is a "magical" point in the song for her "pure voice and emotion to be sung and heard directly."
"People are being so hard on her," Lashar said. "Out of context the video does seem really awkward so [I] get why people are freaking out about it, but at the time it felt like part of an intimate concert."
Lashar said she believes Lorde asked the audience to "shush" due to the fact that the concert was being streamed live on Sirius XM and she was performing the song a capella. She said everyone sang along during the rest of the show.
@abbykahndoit, another TikToker who posted her own footage of the show recently, said she did so after seeing someone else's video of the song "blowing up."
"Some people thought it was so bad and awkward while others thought she did well so I wanted to post mine to see what people thought," @abbykahndoit, whose first name is Abby, wrote to Newsweek.
She said the incident was the first time she's ever seen an artist tell their audience to be quiet during a show. Though she agrees with some of the critiques that Lorde "doesn't sound her best" at points in the video, she says for the remainder of show the singer sounded even better than she does on her albums.
"It was such a good performance," Abby added.
Update 4/12/22, 5:12 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional information and background.
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