Charli xcx Salutes ‘Best So Far’ Crowd at Minneapolis Brat Tour Stop: 5 Best Moments

It was a match made in brat heaven when Charli xcx met some 15,000 Minnesotan fans at Minneapolis’ Target Center on Saturday (April 26) night for the 17th stop on her brat tour.

Her co-headlining Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan last year didn’t include a stop in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but if you had caught one of those dates would have been familiar with the general setup and vibe of the brat tour: a minimalist, clean stage; no band, no backup dancers; bright, strobing lights that evoke a dark club in the throes of a post-midnight rave; a color palette limited mostly to black, white, red, grey and that near-lime brat green; and – it goes without saying – the Essex pop star herself.

While the Sweat Tour found Charli and Troye switching off every 4-5 songs, the brat tour is pure, undistilled xcx – and it hits hard and feels good. Unlike a marathon concert which inevitably leads to peaks and valleys, this is an hour-and-a-half of unrelenting, uncompromising club music and hyperpop, which the animated arena ate up.

Whether she’s prowling through a caged walkway under the stage, flipping her body around while a camera circles her or gratuitously (bratuitously?) licking the floor, Charli xcx remains in constant motion during her show – and at the Target Center, the same held true of her fans. Typically at shows (even successful ones), you’ll have the floor-level fans and the lower levels of the arena standing and dancing throughout the setlist, but the farther you get from the action, the less active the crowd is. For whatever reason, the twenty- and thirty-something girls, gays and party people who turned out in brat green for Charli in Minneapolis made up one of the most uniformly active crowds I’ve ever seen. From start to finish, from floor to ceiling, everyone was on their feet, dancing and singing along; when she told the crowd to jump with her during “Speed Drive,” I couldn’t spot a single person who wasn’t jumping up and down with their finger in the air — even the bleediest of the nosebleeds were partying hard.

Charli noticed, it, too shouting out the crowd’s energy several times over the course of a near-perfect (more on that below) concert. Here were five highlights.