Lorde slams AI glasses during Madrid festival set

Lorde turned part of her Madrid festival set into a public rebuke of AI glasses, taking aim at a gadget category built around cameras, microphones and AI assistance. Videos shared to social media captured the remarks as she performed on Thursday, July 9, 2026, at Mad Cool Festival.

The criticism landed in a pointed setting. Mad Cool’s 2026 lineup put Lorde among artists in Madrid from July 8 to July 11, alongside names including Jennie, Florence + The Machine, Twenty One Pilots and Pulp, while the festival’s sponsor slate included Ray-Ban, a brand tied to Meta’s smart eyewear push. That overlap made Lorde’s onstage comments feel less like an offhand dig and more like a collision between pop culture and one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive consumer technology campaigns.

Meta and EssilorLuxottica launched the next generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses on September 27, 2023, giving the line live streaming, built-in Meta AI, a higher-quality camera and improved audio and microphone systems. Ray-Ban Meta product pages describe the glasses as including a camera, audio and Meta AI features, placing the device squarely in the category Lorde appeared to be rejecting: always-ready wearables that can record, listen and respond without much friction.

That design has become the heart of the privacy debate. Meta says the glasses were developed with privacy in mind and gives wearers control over what and when they share, along with privacy settings for the device. Critics have kept pressing on the same unresolved questions: when a pair of glasses contains a camera, who around the wearer has really agreed to be recorded, and how much ambient data is collected in the process?

The commercial stakes are significant enough to keep the product in the spotlight. Meta and EssilorLuxottica have kept expanding the line into newer generations and styles, betting that smart glasses can move from novelty to mainstream accessory. Lorde’s Madrid comments showed how far the industry still has to go on a different front: not just making the hardware work, but making it feel socially acceptable in public.