Lorde’s Ultrasound Tour Brings Intimate Presence to Massive Arenas with L-Acoustics L-ISA

In 2018, Lorde made history by becoming the first artist to take out a full arena deployment of L-Acoustics L-ISA, utilizing K2 arrays, on her acclaimed Melodrama tour. Following her Solar Power tour four years later, the New Zealand-based artist has more recently returned to arenas with the Ultrasound World Tour—supporting her fourth studio album, Virgin—with a fresh complement of L-Acoustics L Series loudspeakers supplied by Clair Global, which also deployed an L-ISA Hyperreal Sound system on the campaign’s North American dates.

FOH engineer Philip J Harvey, an L-Acoustics Artisan of Sound, has worked with Lorde on all of her tours since the beginning in 2014. “With Virgin, the sonics are more of a hard-driving electronic vision; very dynamic, but still retain an intimacy and vulnerability. This approach was incorporated into Ultrasound. Much of the material from her past albums was reimagined and revamped to fit this tour’s aesthetic. With L-ISA, we wanted this driving force to wash over the audience like a spacious tidal wave at high points and then collapse down into soft, more mono, raw vocal moments. This dynamic contrast really makes a powerful impact on the audience.”

That dynamic interplay between scale and intimacy is made possible in part by the compact form factor of L Series itself. The shorter hangs of L Series, with each L2 or L2D element covering the same contour as four conventional K2 elements in a form factor 46% smaller and 40% lighter, meant the rigging above the stage stayed visually clean, leaving the full impact of that striking set design unmarred, and giving every audience member an unobstructed view of the artist and the performance.

The Ultrasound World Tour has taken Lorde to sold-out arenas across North America, Europe, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Mexico. Crucially, the L-ISA Hyperreal Sound deployment on the North American leg proved that scale and intimacy need not be in conflict; even in the biggest rooms, every audience member could feel Lorde’s presence as though she were performing for them alone. She returns to close out her final festival dates later in August and September into October.

Lorde’s North American L-ISA Deployment
For the world tour’s North American leg, Clair Global’s standard arena deployment featured an L-Acoustics Scene system comprising five arrays of three L2 over one L2D, paired with two identical L Series out-fill arrays, plus left and right hangs of 12 Kara II for 220°-fill. Sixteen KS28 subs flown in two central hangs of eight delivered the show’s low-end reinforcement, complemented by four KS21 mounted into the stage face as front-fill subs.

A dozen L-Acoustics A10 Wide enclosures spread out across the front of the stage lip supplied spatial front-fill. Two more A10 were placed in front of the stage thrust, while one A10 Focus and one A10 Wide atop two KS21 to the far left and right of the stage provided ground out-fill coverage. At NYC’s Madison Square Garden show, the main system was supplemented by three L2 flown in an LCR arrangement over the rear section of the main floor to compensate for the venue’s large central video display.

For power, 24 L-Acoustics LA7.16 amplified controllers drove the L Series enclosures, while 18 LA12X handled everything else. Two L-ISA Processor II units, one used as a redundant backup, facilitated the tour’s object-based mix, with processing and control achieved via two P1 processors, feeding the system over Milan-AVB, and LA Network Manager.

According to Chris Demonbreun, who served as the North American leg’s systems engineer, the initial Soundvision model started with a general design from Josh Lloyd at Britannia Row Productions, a Clair Global brand. “I made a few modifications to make the system fit within the other elements of the show and relied heavily on Soundvision’s Autosolvers,” Demonbreun shares. “They’re really handy tools when deploying L Series, and L-Acoustics has done a strong job with the algorithms they use, especially with the Autofilters. Every venue requires minor tweaks to the system, but we were able to deploy a consistent sounding system every night, and the Soundvision predictions did a great job of matching the real-world results. Philip is, of course, a skilled mix engineer and it was great being able to deliver his mix to every single person that bought a ticket for the show, no matter where their seat was.”

A Fully Spatialized Mix From Front to Back
For those audience members up front, the tour’s use of spatialized front-fills ensured that they also enjoyed a panoramic audio experience. “The coverage on the floor in the spatialized zone that L-ISA provides was exceptional,” says Harvey, who has also worked with Keane, My Bloody Valentine, Mumford & Sons, and The White Stripes, among many others over his 30-years-plus career. “Chris made the daily critical listening arena trek to make sure everywhere in the house sounded consistent, and the spatialized front-fills really drew the audience in the front rows into the immersive experience.”

Demonbreun agrees: “With all of the great tools L-Acoustics provides, L-ISA performs very well in arena settings, and I could make sure that Ella’s performance got delivered to everyone in the audience: 75 percent were in the L-ISA immersive zone, while the rest were hearing fill systems,” he says. “The spatialization from the front-fills is a really cool thing. The L-ISA Processor took all the information from the main Scene and, using L-ISA’s Sound Spaces feature, rendered a tailored immersive environment specifically for the front-fill zone, delivering a well-defined, spatially-coherent experience to those closest to the stage, and it worked really well. One other advantage we had was no stage volume to interfere with the front-fills.”

A Successful Maiden Voyage with L-Acoustics L Series
Although Harvey was intimately familiar with L-ISA, Lorde’s Ultrasound World Tour marks his first opportunity to tour with L-Acoustics L Series loudspeakers. “I am so impressed with the clarity and detail of L2 and L2D,” he says. “To me, they sound like giant studio monitors, and their directionality really cleans up much of the sound that used to roll around behind the speakers in the low to low-mid frequencies in previous systems. L-ISA is incredibly powerful for the ability to take advantage of hyper-dynamics between a mono, soft, intimate setting in one moment, then crescendoing into a massive wide-panned, loud explosion in the next—and L Series delivered this perfectly with precision and clarity.”

From a systems engineering and deployment perspective, L2 and L2D are equally popular with Demonbreun. “I previously used an L Series system for delay hangs on Lana Del Rey’s 2025 UK stadium tour and they’re such impressive boxes. They travel really well and are very quick to deploy and then strike at the end of the night. We utilized the L-Acoustics Clamp 1000 for deploying the main Scene system from truss. The Clamp 1000 is a game-changer—it’s a panning rigging system rated to 1,000 kg that allows you to rotate the entire flown array from the ground, which dramatically reduces the number of motors needed and cuts load-in time. It also means you can fine-tune the azimuth angle of each hang at ground level rather than working at height, which is critical for L-ISA, where consistent array orientation from venue to venue is essential to the immersive image.”

L-ISA: Connecting Artists and Audiences
“We employed the Follow-Me tracking system with Ella’s vocal to really take advantage of L-ISA’s immersive panorama,” Harvey says. “As she walked around the stage, her voice in the speakers followed her physical presence.”

Harvey notes that he particularly appreciates the inherent nature of the L-ISA system being able to translate the mix as intended across the entire floor and into the arena seats, “versus a left-right system, which only offers the full mix to audience members situated directly down the middle ribbon of the arena floor,” he says. “My other standout aspect of L-ISA is the center-hung, end-fire KS28 sub configuration, which was flown above the center L2 array. The low end was clear, clean, and pronounced in a way that’s rare in a large system. The fact that all the sub frequencies were emanating from the same single vertical point means there was no comb filtering from multiple low-end sources in different positions in the room where their interactions end up not aligning in phase.”

From initially setting the bar high on Lorde’s Melodrama tour by incorporating L-ISA, the addition of L2 on the Ultrasound tour has further refined the audience’s experience—and there has been no shortage of compliments on the mix and sound quality from everyone in Lorde’s camp from the top down. “On social media, the reviews from audience members have all been very positive,” Harvey adds. “By and large, it seems they know something is different in the sound design of our show. It definitely reinforces the choices we’ve all made to go with L-Acoustics L Series and L-ISA.”