Concert Review: Dua Lipa

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Just a little over a month ago, my 2017 concert lineup continued strongly with a performance from Dua Lipa, the British pop sensation whose unbelievably 2016 skyrocketed her to a hectic 2017. If you’ve read any of my posts before, you know that I thrive on continuity and love being able to revisit artists and write about them multiple times.

I’ve written about Lipa on a handful of posts (like this one and another one here), it was so exciting to see her shine at her own show – not to mention it was the first show of her winter tour and was sold out: Chicago never disappoints.

After having some festival dates in North America over the summer, Lipa continued to break America after a number of her singles went viral on Spotify – gaining fans after her stint opening up for Troye Sivan on his North American tour in the fall.

Lipa has racked up nearly 500 million plays on her songs, with successful collaborations with Sean Paul and Martin Garrix. If you’re starting to realize where you’ve heard her music before, “Scared To Be Lonely” has almost 190,000,000 streams on Spotify and the duo recently performed it on Jimmy Fallon just a couple weeks ago:

As far as I know, her debut album release date has been pushed back a couple times and I believe the set release date lands somewhere in June. With that being said, there’s only so many songs that an artist can perform that aren’t released yet, but that didn’t stop Lipa’s momentum and her ability to entertain an audience.

As soon as she stepped on the stage, Lipa’s energy was unparalleled – and extremely impressive for being only 21 years old. With a short but impactful set of 10 songs, Lipa opened the set with her hit single “Last Dance” which definitely made the sold audience of about 500 people get rowdy.

After performing two more unreleased songs “Want To” and “Bad Together,” the show’s momentum that was built up within the first 3 minutes of the set started to fade, as it is hard to captivate an audience when they don’t know the music. This lack of energy unfortunately continued (at least for me) when the next two songs were slow jams. Great songs, and Lipa sounded amazing, but I find myself to be particularly specific with how musicians craft their setlists, and I think that this could have been manipulated in a more effective manner. With that being said, I’m sure the order of performances changed while the tour went on.

Some high points of the set was the sing along for Lipa’s breakout track, “Hotter Than Hell,” which is one of her biggest songs to date. My favorite moment of the night was when Lipa sang her closing song, “Blow Ya Mind (Mwah),” probably because it was the song that truly made me a fan of hers and created that sense of intrigue that is necessary for musicians to have with their fans.

Although I do wish that she sang her collaborations with Martin Garrix and Sean Paul (they were later added on the setlists), it was a cool experience to hear some of her unreleased tracks and was impressed by her ability to control an audience, especially since the show was the first of the tour’s.

Her vocal performance was also undeniably impressive, a unique raspiness to her voice gives her the ability to belt it out, notes high and low, and was able to sound like the recorded versions of the songs, despite running around the stage and jumping up and down to keep the crowd invested in the show.