As Charli XCX began her verse in “Girl, so confusing” at Madison Square Garden, you could see the frizzy mane of Lorde in the prop cage below the stage. I fumbled for my phone as I noticed her getting into position maybe all of six seconds before the entire sold-out crowd clocked her presence and erupted into a colossal roar. In all the shows I’ve seen, in all the arenas around the country, this could well have been the loudest audience explosion I’ve ever heard. In professional wrestling, this is called a “pop”—when the crowd deems whatever is happening in the evening’s scripted entertainment to be so extremely good it warrants an above-average ovation, something that registers beyond the normal cheers. Who wouldn’t want to see these two work it out at the live show?
And, also, is Brat wrestling? I was thinking about this as I watched Charli and Troye Sivan’s joint Sweat Tour hit absolute peak time with Lorde’s New York cameo. It had been a couple of years since Lorde appeared on stage in New York—though she was spotted at Clairo’s New York show last week, which made Vegas, or at least pop stans, set favorable odds that she would join Charli at MSG. This is such good writing, I thought while watching Lorde deliver her astoundingly good verse on the “Girl, so confusing” remix. I meant that in both her actual words and the narrative of the evening. Here was Charli XCX, one stiletto perched on top of the zeitgeist, so thoroughly in command of the crowd that she could have played Brat on Spotify with ads and everyone would have said, Yes, thank you. And, yet, here she was bringing out her New Zealand frenemy to sing a duet about their entangled jealousy, insecurity, sorority, and fame. It was so real. It was so fake. It was so Brat.
Before this triumph, the head of the new pop class, Addison Rae, came out to sing a winking simulacrum of pop music, namely “Diet Pepsi,” with Charli and Troye, and her remix of “Von dutch.” It was good, and the crowd popped at her entrance, too, but I nearly feel for Rae, whose appearance was eclipsed by the mere image and memory of Lorde and Charli strutting arm in arm up the catwalk as Lorde spat out, “You walk like a bitch.” In fact, I think the entire show post-Lorde felt like a collective processing of the incident. In the row below me, people were texting, posting, staring at each other in disbelief that they bore witness to Lorde and Charli together on stage. I think I’m still in disbelief, too.
That shouldn’t be the takeaway of the whole Sweat Tour, even if it was the takeaway of this one gargantuan night of the Sweat Tour in New York. The goal of Troye and Charli’s austere, loud, lascivious evening is to take the sweet abandon of the club and scale it up to the arena. This mostly works! From Troye’s swaying Balearic pop gem “My My My!” to Charli’s 178-BPM, bolt-rattling “Speed Drive,” the setlist and production design try to overwhelm the senses to make the arena disappear. The crowd—5% of whom wore bug-eyed wraparound glasses, 10% dressed in chartreuse Brat green, 40% in some kind of crop top—was all in. By the time Troye finally uncorked “Rush” and Charli trotted out “I Love It,” the floor beneath me shook and the entire place was crawling with arms thrust skyward and shoulders moving side to side.
