Charli XCX and Troye Sivan's Dallas Concert: the Party of the Millennium

Charli XCX is, according to a Pitchfork profile from five years ago, “the pop star of the future." Five years before that, she had her first solo Top 10 single on the Billboard Hot 100, “Boom Clap,” as well as a No. 1 hit as a featured artist on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Two years before that, she wrote and was featured on Icona Pop’s inescapable single “I Love It.”

After that, she wouldn’t chart in the Hot 100 again until last year’s “Speed Drive,” her contribution to the Barbie soundtrack, which peaked at No. 73.

Charli has put in her time and pumped out an astounding catalog of the most forward-thinking pop and dance music of the last decade. She’s a critical darling with a devoted cult following, but until recently, it seemed like the future that Pitchfork envisioned would never come to pass. She appeared destined for a long, comfortable career of simply being your coolest friend’s favorite pop artist.

And then Brat, this year’s zeitgeist-defining record, dropped like an electric green atomic bomb. We don’t have time to fully unpack the cultural impact “Brat summer” had, but let’s just say that if Kamala Harris is elected president next month, she might give part of the credit to a tweet from Charli that read “Kamala IS brat.”

That about catches us up to her concert at the American Airlines Center on Wednesday, which she co-headlined with Australian pop singer and frequent collaborator Troye Sivan. As the two repeatedly boasted throughout the night, they “sold that bitch out.”

The crowd was a sea of people in bright lime-green (a nod to the album’s instantly iconic cover) as well as black miniskirts and all kinds of silver details. Dressing to theme for concerts is the new norm, but Charli’s fans feel different from those of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. While we’re sure many people bought new outfits for this show, none of them looked like costumes. They mostly looked like standard fits you’d put together for a night out, just with the same color scheme.

The concert itself, named “The Sweat Tour” after the state its audience is in after it’s finished, has a unique setup for a co-headlined show. Instead of each artist playing separate sets, the two sets are mashed together with Sivan and Charli performing a couple of songs at a time before handing off the mic. The show concludes with them sharing the stage for their duets, “1999” and “Talk Talk.”

When Sivan opened the show with cuts from his latest album, last year’s Something to Give Each Other, he showed how far he’s come from posting original songs about John Green books on YouTube. (He can delete some of those videos from YouTube, but not from the memories of girls on Tumblr in 2013.)

His set mixed sensual, provocative imagery with old-school showmanship and choreography that was reminiscent of the MTV pop era.

Much has been said about pop music’s big comeback this year, with credit usually given to the likes of Charli, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and other “main pop girls.” We’d like to nominate Sivan as one of the unsung heroes of this movement.
Sivan’s slick, choreographed portions of the show provided a perfect foil to the chaos and spontaneity of Charli’s set. She had the most infectious energy, leaping around the stage, mugging for the camera that followed her around and, at one point, licking the runway during Billie Eilish’s “Guess” verse.

Eilish didn’t actually make an appearance during this song, of course. Nor did Lorde during her remix of “Girl, So Confusing.” But these versions of the songs are so beloved by fans that they may not have been able to sing the originals. Charitably, Charli chose to play the fan favorites and strut around the catwalk during her absent friends’ verses.

(Lorde did make a surprise appearance at Charli’s recent New York show, as did “Von Dutch” featured artist Addison Rae. Our one nitpick of the Dallas show is that Charli didn’t save any goodies for us.)

Charli spent most of the show blazing forward with her recent hits and teasing new music. There was no “Boom Clap” and she didn’t treat us to her verse in “Fancy.” We’re a little disappointed by that first one, but the second one is understandable.

She chose only the finest throwbacks, the true “club classics,” to pepper her show. “Vroom Vroom,” produced by the late, great Sophie, has perhaps the most rabid devotion among fans. Critics who gave the song poor reviews when it dropped in 2016 were derided as “homophobic” by Charli’s largely gay audience.

(The reviews weren’t actually homophobic, of course. They were just wrong. “Vroom Vroom” slaps.)

For her final solo encore number, Charli pleasantly surprised millennials in the crowd with “I Love It.” The entire room danced and jumped in unison to the early 2010s indie-pop banger, violently shaking the stands in a way we’ve never felt at this venue.

Though just 32 years old, Charli XCX already has a catalog that can bring multiple generations. From the millennials who bumped “I Love It” and “Boom Clap” to Gen Z-ers who reveled in “Brat Summer” to even the young children present who somehow talked their parents into going with them (or maybe it’s the other way around), it’s clear what she means when she takes her lyrical victory lap during “360”:

“I set the tone / It’s my design.”

There’s no one’s future we’d rather be living in.