Seth Meyers takes Lorde day drinking, which is good work if you can get it

Just to get it out of the way for anyone playing the same drinking game Lorde and Seth Meyers did on Wednesday’s Late Night, the New Zealand singer’s birth name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor. You try remembering that after an ungodly amount of tequila, Crown Royal, and whatever the hell Meyers sloshed together with Four Loko, Red Bull, iced coffee, and some floating espresso beans. (Meyers claimed the thing was inspired by Lorde’s song “Solar Power.”) He could have gone with “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” one supposes, but, hey, we’re not the ones day-drinking with pop superstars on NBC’s dime.

Meyers has said that his advancing years (and his wife) have caused him to curtail the frequency of these fan favorite segments (it looks like his last one was with those now-legal Jonas Brothers in January 2020), and you can see why. The now 47-year-old late-night host isn’t pulling beery all-nighters at SNL any more, after all, he’s—as Meyers boasted in mid-binge—working a whole four nights a week at a very responsible job. So might as well make the segment count, as Meyers and Lorde truly took some serious shots for the team (and our entertainment) in a cozy, deserted bar (New York’s fancy-schmancy Zero Bond) filled with shiny, shiny bottles and various contest-adjacent props.

Can Meyers remember Lorde’s real name, under penalty of more drinking? Eh, sort of. Whose recreation of the painterly cover of Melodrama is better after drinking, well, everything? There’s a poll. Whose hometown slang is more incomprehensible when swilling down whatever a tipsy singer and talk show host can get their hands on? Tough call, but Meyers’ Boston-accented “30 rack” edges it, based on his assertion that that’s how his Masshole friends pronounce the name of the building where he works. The pair also took a swing at identifying various royal types (because, “Royals”), which quickly devolved into griping from Meyers that he got all the hard ones. (To be fair, King Ecgberht of Wessex is a tougher pull than the current English monarch. Or Prince.)

In the end, the bout of daytime boozing went about as smoothly as could be expected, with Meyers drunkenly crooning along to “Green Light” while jumping all over the bar’s sturdy furniture. And if the Late Night crew couldn’t locate a single New Zealand beer in Lorde’s honor, we did get to see the proud Kiwi spit out the Foster’s Lager that kicked things off, along with the spectacle of Seth Meyers making a happy fool of himself. After all, isn’t that what’s important? (Lorde’s real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor. Drink.)