There’s a moment—somewhere between the bass rattling my ribcage and the strobe lights slicing the darkness into cold, surgical fragments—where it stops feeling like a concert. Feels more like we’re inside something. A weather system. A force field. Loreen moves through it like she’s the only one who knows the way out. Or in. Hard to tell which. Barefoot, sinewy, kinetic. She isn’t dancing so much as shifting tectonic plates with her body. Everything quivers around her. The air is thick, electric. Like a storm is about to break, but never does.
She barely speaks, not i the way other pop artists do. No hey-London-how-you-doin’, no let-me-hear-you-make-some-noise. Just presence. Command. A flick of her wrist and the room exhales. A single inhale and we’re locked into her gravity. This is a ritual, not a gig. She knows it. We know it. No one dares break the spell.
“In My Head” unspools like vapor, ambient synths curling around her voice. A whisper at first, murmured incantation, then it thickens, surges. Her voice isn’t just powerful, it’s a physical presence, pressing down, suffocating, then lifting, weightless. The lights stay low, as if afraid of revealing too much. She moves like a shadow, barely tethered to this dimension. There’s a sense she might dissolve at any moment, drift away in a current of sound. The bassline says otherwise, anchoring everything, holding us inside the dream she’s constructing.
And then “Euphoria.” Recognition shatters the trance, the crowd erupts, bodies slam forward, hands reach out like disciples. But she doesn’t deliver it straight. It builds, teases, pulls away just before impact. The first drop doesn’t drop at all, just dissipates like mist. She stretches the tension so thin you can feel it tremble. And then, finally, it hits—like light breaking through thick, frozen sky. The room is unmoored, bodies weightless, lifting. We are not in Electric Brixton anymore. We are inside the song, inside her voice, inside something ancient and cosmic and unnameable. She sings “we are free now,” and it’s impossible to doubt her.
She doesn’t let us linger there. “Tattoo” follows like an aftershock, but colder, more deliberate. The choreography sharp, almost militant. Where “Euphoria” expands, “Tattoo” tunnels inward, the beat a slow, relentless pulse. The crowd sings every word back to her, and for a moment, it’s hard to tell whose voice is whose. Hers cuts through, elemental, precise. The song is about permanence, love seared into skin, into bone. Tonight, it feels less like a love song and more like a brand. Something irreversible.
She gives us quiet, but it’s never soft. “Is It Love” sways in like a mirage, something distant shimmering just beyond reach. There’s an ache in it, something unresolved. A low synth hum cradles her vocal, stretching it thin, fragile. The audience is hushed, breath held, the moment so delicate it could disintegrate. And then, an acoustic reprise—just her, just voice, just stillness. It’s almost too much. Too bare. You can hear the creak of the venue, the pulse of bodies shifting, the electricity humming between us all. The quiet is heavier than the bass was before.
Then she breaks it. “Statements.” The rupture. The firestorm. If the set so far has been a slow spellbinding, this is the exorcism. A metallic synth drone swells beneath her, the kind of sound that doesn’t ask permission—it enters the body, rewires the pulse. Her voice is a war cry now, urgent, untamed. The lights don’t flicker—they assault. Stark white beams fracture the darkness, illuminating flashes of her face, a clenched fist, the sinew in her throat as she howls the chorus. It’s not a plea, it’s a demand. “We don’t need no statements,” she sings, and yet every second of this is one. The show ends not with resolution, but with tension. With something left unsaid. A final glance, a pause just long enough to make us doubt we imagined it all.
Then she’s gone. No bows, no waves, just an absence where she was. The lights stay low for a long time after, like even they’re struggling to recover. People linger, unmoving, eyes unfocused, still caught in the undertow. Walking out into the November air feels wrong, like waking up too fast from a dream. I half expect to look down and find myself barefoot, a mark on my skin where the night branded itself.
A show, a storm, a séance. Whatever it was, it’s still in my bones. And it’s not leaving any time soon.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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