When Troye Sivan, pop’s pre-eminent twink, and Charli xcx, the 32-year-old British club rat, booked their first headlining arena tour earlier this year, the pairing seemed like a natural fit, if not the most sonically cohesive. Both artists, longtime friends and occasional collaborators, had new music coming out; both produce heady, deliriously catchy songs about the glories of intoxication, for overlapping, largely queer fanbases. Together, they could transcend pop’s so-called middle class into full-fledged arena stardom.
And then Brat happened. Brash, unapologetic, irony-tinged and sincerely messy, Charli’s club-ready album, released in June, became the soundtrack of the internet’s summer, her most commercially successful project to date as well as a meme, an ethos, a vibe. In a few months, Charli went from niche-famous pop star with a rabid cult following, underground bona fides and critical acclaim to CNN roundtable subject and viral hit-maker, with songs big enough to make it on the playlists of straight weddings outside New York and LA. So it was that at Madison Square Garden on Monday night (365 party girl, for real), the crowd for the co-headlining Sweat tour was a two-toned sea of “city sewer slut” black and brat green – the sickly, striking shade that took over the internet, was co-opted by a presidential campaign, and will likely go down as the color of 2024.
Sweat (the show) was, on the one hand, a solid two-plus hours of uppers-only music that delivered on the promise of loud, horny, personality-forward pop. On the other, a show that evinced the at times awkward tensions inherent in popularity. What happens when both headliners have the catalog and the stage presence, but only one has the zeitgeist? When music designed for a club – and a tour ethos marketed as hot, sticky and druggy – meets the reality of a heavily air-conditioned and sectioned arena? (It feels spiritually wrong to listen to Charli’s music with a seat behind you.) Or when the devout loyalty of a longtime fanbase – mostly gay men, plus some cool-aiming straight women – merges with the shapeless enthusiasm of people who know a few songs and have money to buy tickets, which were reselling for the thousands before showtime?
When does something genuinely cool, which is also sending up the idea of being cool, become so popular it may not be cool any more? It’s an anxiety Charli herself has pointed to on the album and in post-Brat interviews, though it did not seem top of mind on stage on Monday night. Split near evenly between Sivan’s catalog and Charli’s brat-heavy rotation, Sweat’s interlocking chapters unevenly paired their respective styles (languid, sensual, warm; jagged, pulsing, ecstatic) as a sort of pop victory party. “I never really saw this for myself, but bitch I proved them fuckin’ wrong, motherfucker,” Charli crowed before Sympathy is a knife, a track about cutting jealousy with a blind item for another, bigger pop girl who plays stadiums and dated someone in the 1975 (“I couldn’t even be her if I tried” is for the best).
After a stint making the most of her record label’s A&R and budget for backup dancers with 2022 album Crash, Charli thankfully returned to basics: black sunglasses, just a mic and a hard look at the camera, all attitude and Auto-Tune – strange to see in an arena, but still enough pure force of persona to carry thousands through a mock rave of Brat (plus Track 10 and Vroom Vroom, for the old-timers) and, as the TikToks will say, slay. Sivan, with less coked-up beats to rely on, opted for light choreography, an entourage of similarly lithe male backup dancers and many a sexualized moment with the mic for a slow-build set that opened with Get Me Started, cruised through My My My! and a teenage bedroom-set Rager Teenager! and finally hit with popper-coded closer Rush.
Though a joint show in construction, Sweat was effectively a Charli concert – the bare-bones, scaffolded set befitted her gritty, indie sleaze aesthetic. The relatively lo-fi operation – a couple of onstage cameras, a catwalk, one rising platform, beats – were archetypically brat, if a watered-down version of her highly coveted Boiler Room set. And the guest highlights of the evening were firmly from the Charli-verse – the former TikTok star turned singer Addison Rae, for the live debut of her decidedly non-Brat single Diet Pepsi (a nice favor from her friends, which went down easy), and, in the moment that drew the most prolonged hysteria for the evening, the appearance of Lorde to work it out on the remix of Girl, so confusing. Strutting down the catwalk, twinning with dark, teased hair, the pair cemented their unfiltered, real-time catharsis as a pop triumph, and an exclamation point on the Brat era.
And a moment re-enacted and relived on the sidewalk outside MSG after the show, where a large crowd continued bumpin’ that in an ad hoc mini-rave – like me, unable or unwilling to readjust out of the bratosphere. The party is much bigger now – arguably too big – and shows no signs of slowing down.
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