Charli XCX gives us the (sweaty) anti-lockdown

Charli XCX Lafayette, N1C ★★★★✩

CHARLI XCX’s career has been built on fruitful collaborations and songs about infinite nights out with never-ending afters — basically, she does not seem like a person who would thrive during a global lockdown.

For a long time, the album that she made during those long, strange months in 2020 (How I’m Feeling Now) didn’t feel like it would ever reach its full potential by making a sweaty club full of screeching people dance but at Lafayette last night, all that pent-up energy finally found its outlet. More than any other live show I’ve seen since gigs returned, this said: lockdown is over, now make out with the stranger next to you.

Of course, it’s sort of surreal to be feeling that during a time when there is again talk of restrictions but the release that Charli XCX brought to the small venue bit its thumb at all that. She strode out looking like someone from The Matrix styled by

Miss Piggy, all flouncy black and Oakley sunglasses. As an aficionado of autotune, Charli doesn’t give a powerhouse vocal performance, that’s not the point, rather, she gave us something that drew on the pummelling energy of dank techno clubs and the melodrama of a drag show.

She thrived on the small stage, with inches between her and the crowd, and threw her body through gyrations and air punches as though she were an anonymous body in a crowd. She occasionally got frustrated that the power she was giving out wasn’t matched by a crowd who seemed bowled over by her. “I wanna see you f***ing do something,” she yelled, as Forever descended into clanking industrial noise with a beat that wanted to see you on all fours. “Anything!”

The tenderness of C2.0 and Party 4 U was a reminder that under that brash bravado and demands for more beats was a heart that truly ached for human connection during the time when all we had was Zoom. Charli XCX gave us the anti-lockdown: a thrumming, crackling mass of sweaty, breathless, clawing love.