Lorde threatened with arrest by by NYPD for ‘riot incitement’

Cops had to shut down her music video shoot because a mob showed up after Lorde posted on her Instagram Story. Photo / Getty Images

Kiwi singer-songwriter Lorde has been threatened with arrest by anti-terrorism police in the US.

The 28-year-old singer had planned to film the music video for What Was That? in Washington Square Park in New York, but after posting about it on her Instagram Story, “such a mob showed up that the cops shut it down”, and Lorde received a stern warning from officers.

Speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said: “We had the anti-terrorism unit being very intense, telling me if I stepped on the premises I would be arrested for riot incitement.”

The Royals hitmaker “couldn’t show up for many hours” but eventually returned to the park to shoot the video on a tight timeline.

She explained: “I came back later, they said, ‘You can go out, you have one shot at it.’

“If people don’t maybe know this, we were launching my first song for this album, but we were also shooting the music video, which would come out 24 hours later.

“So there was an edit that had to be gotten to very quickly.

“A lot of dominoes had to fall right for this to work. The NYPD was definitely a spanner.”

Following Lorde’s revelation, police confirmed they intervened because she didn’t have the right permits to be in the park with her fans.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) told People magazine in a statement: “On Tuesday, April 22, 2025, at approximately 1847 hours in the vicinity of Washington Square Park, in the confines of the 6th Precinct, officers were alerted of an unscheduled event inside of the park.

“A sound and parks permit is required to have a concert in a New York City Park. This individual did not possess either. Organisers of the event were informed they could not perform, and they left the location.”

Elsewhere during the interview, Lorde hailed MDMA therapy as a game-changer when it came to tackling her “horrific” stage fright.

She said: “Some of these things live very deep in the body, and you hold on to it.

“You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at. But when you bypass that and get to the body, something shifts. And that totally happened for me.”

After having tried “everything” beforehand, Lorde was delighted to get immediate relief from her performance anxiety.

She said: “I was like, oh, it’s over. I know it’s over.”