Six months after Charli XCX casually told British Vogue that “the dance floor is dead,” the English pop star opened her show at the Kia Forum on Saturday, Oct. 17 with “Rock Music,” the opening track on her new “Music, Fashion, Film.”
But don’t think for one minute that the dance music Charli XCX celebrated on “Brat,” the 2024 album that rocketed her success to an entirely new level, is over.
Oh, no, no, no. From “Rock Music” through the 28 songs that followed over an hour and 40 minutes on Saturday, only a handful of times did the music slow past the point of danceability. The new stuff is different in structure and style, but it’s still got a beat you can dance to.
And Charli XCX remains a powerful presence, holding the stage even as a rock band played behind her, a few dozen backing dancers strutted the stage with her, and surprise guests Chappell Roan and Pinkpantheress joined her to the delight of fans who packed the house.
“Rock Music” did signal a shift in her stage presentation. Instead of the more minimalist look of her “Brat” stage, here a three-tiered industrial-style structure created different levels on which she could perform.
For the opening run of songs, where six of the first seven were drawn from the new album, Charli stood almost stationary at the center of the second level, a guitarist, drummer, bassist-keyboardist on either side of her, looking more like the traditional rock artist than the club diva of her “Brat” era.
Highlights early on included such new numbers as “Wink Wink,” “Persona” and “Card Declined,” the latter of which saw her appear in silhouette in an open door on the first level of the stage structure and then strutting down the ramp that thrust into the floor crowd trailed by backing dancers like models on a fashion show runway.
The dancers vanished, leaving Charli at the end of the ramp for the slower, moodier “I’m Afraid,” flames now flickering from the end of the runway, illuminating her in a warm glow as she sang its introspective lyrics of self-doubt.
The middle of the set shifted into older tracks [the electro-pop of “Track 10,” the aggressive club beats of “Pink Diamond”] and a large swath of “Brat” favorites such as “Girl, So Confusing.”
After “House,” one of two songs in the show she wrote for the soundtrack of “Wuthering Heights,” Charli paused to introduce the next song – and guest.
“So I made a promise that every night I’m going to sing an old song,” she said. “And I asked a friend of mine the other day if she’d sing a song with me, because she lives here.
“They said the only way I’m doing it if it’s this song, so you have her to thank for this.”
Out walked Chappell Roan, dressed in a metal-studded leather bikini like a fantasy adventure comic book’s warrior princess, there to sing the fan favorite “Boom Clap,” which Charli hadn’t done live in years.
A run of “Brat” hits followed, beginning with “Club Classics,” “365” and “360,” and continuing through “Sympathy is a Knife” and “Von Dutch,” the latter one of two numbers Charli played as she closed out the Grammy Awards broadcast in 2025.
“You know what, I think it needs to get a little bit more British in here,” she said at the end of “Von Dutch,” and to the audience’s delight, out walked Pinkpantheress to sing her own “Stateside” with Charli on backing vocals.
“Guess,” the second “Brat” song from the Grammy performance, followed. It was missing Billie Eilish, who sang on one version of it, and, who knows, could show up Sunday, Oct. 18, for the second night, but included all the wild, writhing dancing by Charli and the dancers.
And it included all the panties, too. You know, the panties that were part of the music video with Billie, and which are shot from T-shirt cannons transformed into panty cannons, into the crowd every show.
The rock band returned as the show turned back to “Music, Fashion, Film” for much of the final run of the show. “If You Take Away the Music Then What Has She Got?” was powerful in that vein of introspection and insecurity that sometimes slips into Charli’s lyrics, making them deeper than disco in the range of dance-floor emotions.
“2007” looked back at the year Charli’s pop aspirations took her from the bedroom dream to the reality of the stage. [Yes, she’s been doing this for two decades, which makes the mainstream breakout with “Brat” and follow-up of “Music, Fashion, Film” even more impressive.]
For the earlier favorites of “Party for U” and “Vroom, Vroom,” Charli climbed stairs inside the industrial stage set to the top of the third tier, where she sang them standing and sitting inside a giant circular portal out of which wisps of smoke had floated all night long.
More new songs, including “Magic Metal Montana,” written about her friend and frequent producer A.G. Cook, and the lighter pop of “SS26” brought the show to its final number.
“No One Lasts Forever” closes the new album and for good reason, too. It’s a deep, powerful song with lyrics that open with Charli singing about art, life and legacies, which eventually segues into a kind of duet with the filmmaker David Cronenberg.
In his spoken lyrics, taken from a conversation he had with Charli about a near-death experience he’d had, the director argues that artists should enjoy their work in the moment, and not worry about how it will be received in a day, a month, a year, an eternity.
“They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” Cronenberg’s voice repeated over and over and over as Charli and her backing dancers surrounding her, stood motionless for minutes, frozen until another phrase from Cronenberg – “Oblivion is freedom” – filled the screen and finished the dance.
The dance floor isn’t dead at all. It’s just become something more meaningful with Charli XCX.