At first, you see the girl sitting a few rows up on the Metro-North wearing a T-shirt that reads “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it.” Then, a plastic miniskirt reflecting the fluorescent lighting on the subway, and a crowd of tiny tops and even tinier sunglasses outside Penn Station. Before you know it, you’re among a sea of bright green shirts, black leather boots, and shirts that reference drugs and angels. Brat summer is on its way to the grave, but something is undeniably pulsing, breathing, and alive inside a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Welcome to the SWEAT Tour.
A collaborative concert headlined by Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, the SWEAT Tour builds on a pop culture tilt towards electronic club music a decade in the making. Charli’s latest album, brat, found itself in uncharted territory within her decade-and-a-half-long career. It was met with smashing critical acclaim, spawned a viral TikTok dance trend, and confused the majority of the American electorate as political candidates co-opted the album’s green-tinged image. On the 2023 Something To Give Each Other, Sivan shirks the softboy yearning of his earlier projects with unabashedly erotic music videos and sensual lyricism. SWEAT gifts 2024 with the energy and sexual intensity of an early 2000’s club bathroom.
For a tour marked by images of intimate, druggy basements and sexed-up singles, the process of walking through security and finding our seats felt almost vanilla. The guards seemed much more concerned with directing us toward the stairwell and reciting a script about lithium-ion batteries than with complimenting our carefully curated ensembles. You want to scan me for metal, but not guess the color of my underwear?
Even the arena itself felt sterile. Opener Shygirl whipped around platinum blonde hair while backup dancers twerked in rhythm with her song “FREAK” for a still-filling-in arena. Troye Sivan opened the headlining set with a tightly choreographed dance number to “Got Me Started.” The show was musically and aesthetically flawless—where was the sleaze, the messiness, the I-just-did-a-line mindset that brat summer promised?
Sivan left the stage in a cloud of fog.. A hyperpop beat started playing while a 50-foot tall “brat” curtain dropped over the front of the stage. Flashing strobe lights intensified with the screaming of the crowd. And then, for a moment, it all went quiet. The lights turned off. The curtain fell. Standing alone, in front of a crowd of 20,000 was Charli XCX. The crowd instantly cheered as she began playing the “365” remix with Shygirl, calling back to her February Boiler Room set which christened the brat era.
As impressive as the stage and lighting design of the show is, there is no confusing MSG with the kinds of clubs Charli has been playing since she was 14. Is it sacrilegious to listen to club classics on a second-balcony arena seat with a Yale-branded tote bag propped in front of us? With blasting AC preventing a single drop of perspiration from emerging from our bodies during the entire 120-minute set? Is the SWEAT tour an inherently impossible concept?
Charli and Troye swung between moments of high-autotune solos and unabashedly homoerotic dance ensembles, each transition marked by a playful “Give it up for Troye Sivan!” or “What the fuck is up Charli?” As Troye sang into a microphone positioned allusively between his backup dancer’s legs during “Got Me Started,” or Charli licked the glass catwalk stage during “Guess,” it felt like the exceptionally hedonistic brat summer had morphed into a nudist retreat. Bodies and innuendo were on full display, but all so expected—so sexy, in such a sexless setting.
As soon as “Spring Breakers” mellows into a serene ballad, an angelic Addison Rae emerges from a snow-white balcony, and the beginning notes of “Diet Pepsi” reverberate throughout Manhattan to screaming applause. She moves onto the main stage to perform the “Von dutch” remix she features on, running around barefoot, being lifted by a swarthy backup dancer, and screaming on the floor.
Just a few minutes later, Charli is joined on stage by Lorde to perform “Girl, so confusing”. Charli wears white and Lorde is all clad in black while they strut across the stage—fully embracing the doppelganger comparisons with their long black hair styled in the same textured, loose curl. Addison and Lorde’s surprise appearances are deeply rewarding for fans who have followed Charli’s mentorship of Addison’s turn from TikTok star to popstar, or the beef between Charli and Lorde, spotlighted and squashed on a single track. In a sense, these surprise appearances are not surprising at all. After months of obsession over not only her music, but also her persona, it is hard for Charli XCX to truly surprise us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be enraptured by her digital world brought to life, that we can’t keep bumping that 365.
SWEAT is where the chronically online meets the deeply communal. It’s where the intimate and incessantly horny meets the industrial and sterile. In a world that treats 4×6 screens as sacred, Charli and Troye extend an invitation to stop scrolling and start participating—to feel something visceral, even when the arena feels more like a mall than a warehouse rave.
