Charli XCX and Troye Sivan's Sweat tour is a sort of girls-and-gays summit to cap off BRAT Summer, a coming-together of two left-field pop stars who, after years spent glittering up the dark, are suddenly being kissed by the white-hot light of genuine superstardom.
The pair's respective aesthetic languages — the slinky, femme twink who loves to cosplay as the winking jock and the hedonistic, bruising bad girl with a heart of soft jelly — are a match made in sissy heaven, the kind of mash-up that promised a luxurious, symbiotic (and sweaty) tandem arena show that would see the duo join forces for something more powerful than the sum of its parts.
Instead, Charli and Troye's Toronto show at Scotiabank Arena did more to highlight the vast differences in their approaches than it did bring them together. Their show on Wednesday night felt less like the arrival of a new arena-sized language and more like a dismantling of the very practice. Somehow, it still worked, a whiplash-inducing collision of old and new school, further proof that in our Post-Pop Star™ Era, there's no one way to dominate the floor.
The general (anecdotal) consensus regarding the Sweat tour is that people are coming for Charli and happily taking Troye — the Australian pop star has been firmly positioned as being under Charli's wing, a lucky break that finds him along for the ride as she reaches mass impact.
However, Sivan's performance last night disrupted that assumption — a slick, sensual and ecstatically choreographed stage show fed by a reverence for the Janets and Britneys and Kylies that came before him, Sivan's mode of showmanship felt arguably better-suited for the stadium enormity of it all, dotted with set pieces (a keg, a bed, a handful of chairs) and crowded with dancers.
Sivan opened the show with "Got Me Started," "What's the Time Where You Are?" and "My, My, My," an energetic triple-whammy that highlighted the growing strength of his catalogue. Sivan's music has always felt like lowercase-p pop, the kind of music that, despite hitting all the big emotions and grand statements of classic pop music, is always pushing in from the left rather than radiating from the centre. Hearing these songs — "Dance to This," "Bloom," "Rush" and "One of Your Girls," in particular — boom through an arena, it felt like maybe he'd been the real deal all along.
It was when Charli first came out that the energy tripped, ever so slightly. After the slick, populated spectacle of Sivan's opening triplet, Charli's stark arrival — blitzing through the "365" remix with opener Shygirl by her side, taunting the crowd rather than two-stepping — felt naïve and shaggy, as though her crowd of dancers had missed their bus to the venue.
The feeling, thankfully, was short-lived. What first felt slightly sweaty and awkward quickly became sweaty and sublime, Charli's insistence on taking the stage alone injecting the show with a blade-sharp punk fervour. There's little precedent in the world of arena performance for what Charli is doing on the Sweat tour, a chaotic and freewheeling performance — costumed by severe leathers and tattered skirts, all bulk and sharp corners — that relies entirely on her megawatt star power and violent gravitational pull. There was no choreography to speak of, with Charli grinding and twirling and stalking across the stage with a feral electricity, her buzz-saw beats and impudent melodies tilting the stadium sideways each time she reappeared to burn away Sivan's slick, sexy professionalism. Songs like "Von dutch," "Sympathy is a knife," "Everything is romantic" and "Apple" sounded like the anthems they are, welcomed by thunderous screams and flailing bodies from every direction.
Toward the end of the night, the two headliners began interacting more regularly, nearly pulling their opposing poles into a happy middle ground as they playfully bantered — "Hey Charli!," "Hey Troye!" — and ran about through the industrial set of scaffolding, popping in with ad libs or complementary choreo. Still, the spark-inducing friction of their respective approaches maintained until the end, giving the show a manic push-and-pull that couldn't have existed had they hit the road as solo ventures.
The night's highest high came at the top of the encore, as the shattered, squelching intro to "Track 10" scrambled brains and shook the lights. There was Charli, alone again, a camera in her face as she crawled and thrashed and flung herself through what remains her signature song, an imperfect encapsulation of her imperfect vision of pop's future. It's a total dismantling of everything we know about pop anthems, about expressing heartache, a song that stops and starts and grates and grinds — and yet there you are, singing along.