LordeLorde is bringing her Ultrasound World Tour to New Zealand next week, followed by Australia the week after, but before she returns home, she’s making headlines for another reason.
The Green Light singer revealed that she donated her take from merchandise sales in Minneapolis, which totalled $204,000, to the Minnesota Immigration Rights Action Committee and the Immigrant Defence Network.
Lorde performed two shows in Minneapolis back in October. She announced the merch cut donation on her Instagram Stories today, captioning a photo of the words “ICE out” written on her hand.
Amidst a tumultuous time in the US, in which the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) federal law enforcement agency continues to make headlines for its agents’ actions in Minneapolis and throughout the US, many musicians are speaking out.
Lorde via Instagram Stories
Lorde joins a chorus of artists who have made statements against ICE, Variety reports. At the Grammy Awards on Sunday (1 February), numerous artists wore “ICE out” pins on the Red Carpet, while artists including Billie Eilish and Album of the Year winner Bad Bunny aired their thoughts about the current situation in their acceptance speeches.
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Accepting the award for Song of the Year (for WILDFLOWER), Eilish proclaimed that “no one is illegal on stolen land” and expressed the difficulty in knowing what to say or do in the current climate, but said she felt hopeful in a room of like-minded souls.
She concluded, “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter, and fuck ICE.”
Upon winning the Best Música Urbana Album award, Bad Bunny used the opportunity to say “ICE out.”
“We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” he said in a moving speech. “We are humans, and we are Americans. Also, I will say to people, I know it’s tough to know not to hate on these days... The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So please, we need to be different.”
Lorde returns to New Zealand and Australia this month in support of her latest album, Virgin. She’s set to perform sold-out nights in Auckland, Christchurch, Brisbane, two nights each in Sydney and Melbourne (the Rod Laver Arena shows sold out), and a show in Perth. You can find final tickets via the Frontier Touring website.
“A big part of this album for me, and part of why I call it Virgin, is because I really had this sort of feeling of rebirth at some point in 2023,” Lorde explained in a recent cover story interview with The Music.
She added, “I changed a lot about my life, and I took away a lot of the structures that I had relied upon to be like, ‘This is my life, and I know what I'm doing.’ My vibe for a long time had been: ‘I got this.’ I think a lot about this album is choosing to not know where it’s going to go and let it happen to you.”
