Most of your favorite musicians haven’t performed in over a year at this point — unless your favorite musician is Lorde, who ended her Melodrama world tour in November 2018 and promptly left the live stage once again, just as she had done when her Pure Heroine tour ended four years prior. But that won’t be the case for much longer. In just over a year, the pop singer-songwriter will headline Barcelona’s wildly stacked Primavera Sound festival on June 10, 2022, her first live show since the Melodrama tour. Just because this is Lorde’s first announced show doesn’t mean it’ll mark her live return, as she could be setting up for a busy 2022 once concerts come back, and Primavera is one of the first festivals to announce a 2022 lineup. Lorde, for her part, told fans a year ago in a May 2020 newsletter that she’d been in the studio with Melodrama producer Jack Antonoff since December 2019, meaning a third album could be on the horizon. In November, she announced a photo book of a trip to Antarctica with friend Harriet Were, for release sometime in 2021.
Lorde, of course, is far from the only big name on the Primavera Sound lineup. After the Spanish festival had to cancel its 20th-anniversary edition in 2020, and then its 2021 comeback as well, it’s set to go all out in 2022, with two weekends of music and other shows on the weeknights in between. Other headliners include everyone from Pavement (originally set to reunite at Primavera 2020), Massive Attack, Tame Impala, Beck, the Strokes, Gorillaz, Jorja Smith, Tyler, the Creator, Interpol, Megan Thee Stallion, the National, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Disclosure, Jamie xx, Dua Lipa, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And further down the lineup, another reclusive pop star setting one of her first live shows in years: Sky Ferreira.