It was a match made in brat heaven when Charli xcx met some 15,000 Minnesotan fans at Minneapolis’ Target Center on Saturday (April 26) night for the 17th stop on her brat tour.
Her co-headlining Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan last year didn’t include a stop in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but if you had caught one of those dates would have been familiar with the general setup and vibe of the brat tour: a minimalist, clean stage; no band, no backup dancers; bright, strobing lights that evoke a dark club in the throes of a post-midnight rave; a color palette limited mostly to black, white, red, grey and that near-lime brat green; and – it goes without saying – the Essex pop star herself.
While the Sweat Tour found Charli and Troye switching off every 4-5 songs, the brat tour is pure, undistilled xcx – and it hits hard and feels good. Unlike a marathon concert which inevitably leads to peaks and valleys, this is an hour-and-a-half of unrelenting, uncompromising club music and hyperpop, which the animated arena ate up.
Whether she’s prowling through a caged walkway under the stage, flipping her body around while a camera circles her or gratuitously (bratuitously?) licking the floor, Charli xcx remains in constant motion during her show – and at the Target Center, the same held true of her fans. Typically at shows (even successful ones), you’ll have the floor-level fans and the lower levels of the arena standing and dancing throughout the setlist, but the farther you get from the action, the less active the crowd is. For whatever reason, the twenty- and thirty-something girls, gays and party people who turned out in brat green for Charli in Minneapolis made up one of the most uniformly active crowds I’ve ever seen. From start to finish, from floor to ceiling, everyone was on their feet, dancing and singing along; when she told the crowd to jump with her during “Speed Drive,” I couldn’t spot a single person who wasn’t jumping up and down with their finger in the air — even the bleediest of the nosebleeds were partying hard.
Charli noticed, it, too shouting out the crowd’s energy several times over the course of a near-perfect (more on that below) concert. Here were five highlights.
“I f–king love you three!” Charli said after a thumping “Club Classics,” pointing out three fans dancing on a side-stage staircase. “I wanna tell you a secret right now: you might be the mother–king craziest crowd,” she said, to which the audience roared back their high-decibel love. “It’s the truth – I’m not even playing around and doing that stage talk sh-t,” she laughed.
“I see the stuff online sometimes where people are like, ‘Oh my God she didn’t even have any dancers,’” Charli said at one point, adopting a California vocal fry while intimating her haters. “’It’s just her up there throwing herself around. How boring.’ And I’m like, ‘Bitch, you get up here and do it then, motherf–cker. I’d like to see you try!’”
“I’m having so much f–king fun,” Charli said after a high-octane “Speed Drive” from Barbie the Album. “Sometimes I lie, but I really am. We’re all a little bit hungover but you’re making me feel like I’m at the party again,” she continued. “You party hard.”
After whipping around a white neon rope dangling from the ceiling during the first part of her encore, xcx went to rectangular stage in the middle of the arena for a soaking wet throwback to Pop 2. While blue-red lights blasted out, a giant shower head descended from the ceiling and turned on the faucet, drenching the English pop star as she writhed and splashed around during a glitchy, blissful “Track 10.”
At this point in her career, people are buying Charli xcx tickets to hear songs from brat, which became her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200 (No. 3), produced six Billboard Hot 100 hits and was named our staff pick for the best album of 2024. Even so, “I Love It” – the Icona Pop song she co-wrote and featured on which went top 10 on the Hot 100 in 2013 – is still a crowd-riling jam, and it serves as a solid setlist cap for this tour. Her stellar Minneapolis show had almost ended without a hitch, until the screen behind her flashed the name of the wrong city, Austin, during her outro (she played the Texas town’s Moody Center three days earlier).
“Oh, they didn’t change it,” she said ruefully, noticing the mistake. (For the record, Charli 100% knew what city she was in, shouting out Minneapolis numerous times.) Despite the slight, the crowd didn’t seem plussed (that’s Minnesota nice for ya), particularly when she followed it up with this: “Let’s be real – you were the best (audience) so far.” At that point, there was no need to toss in an assurance of honesty – the connection between the crowd and the artist was undeniable.
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