Kim Petras, O2 Academy: an oddly clinical evening that went down a storm
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Kim Petras pulled out all the stops for her show in Birmingham on Tuesday night: a setlist split into themed acts, with costume changes, props, dancers, and a healthy dose of camp. But this was no stadium stage – rather, the 3,000-capacity O2 Academy, in Birmingham.
It was the first night of the European leg of a world tour supporting Feed the Beast, the German artist’s major-label debut album: a misleading term, given that Petras has been releasing music for seven years. The title, based on advice she received from a record label executive, reflects her wolfish appetite for mainstream success. But in its dogged pursuit of the Top 10, the album – a kind of love letter to late-2000s pop and trashy 1980s Europop – sacrifices the eccentricity that has made her work interesting in the past.
You wouldn’t have guessed Feed the Beast had any detractors at all from the Tuesday-night crowd’s rapturous reception of its songs. They came mostly in the first act – after Petras made the obligatory grand entrance, in masked ball attire – and included Unholy, her 2022 hit with Sam Smith for which she became the first transgender woman to win a Grammy.
Despite that success, Petras remains in pop’s middle class, alongside artists like Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX: wielding power on social media but not in the charts, she’s consigned to relatively modest venues but has the showy aesthetic and ambition of Lady Gaga or Katy Perry – at a time when artists such Billie Eilish brought a moody, subdued quality to the fore.
“I’m one of the biggest pop studiers,” Petras told The New Yorker last year, and that scholarly devotion was discernible all night. She donned a Britney-style schoolgirl outfit in the second act, a brash, lascivious run of songs that celebrated her does-what-it-says-on-the-tin 2022 EP Slut Pop and its imminent sequel, Slut Pop Miami. After dipping into Problématique, an album scrapped last year after it had been leaked, came older tracks: her 2017 breakthrough I Don’t Want it at All, her silly viral hit Coconuts, and Alone, her single with Nicki Minaj that crumbles under the weight of its sample, Alice Deejay’s 1998 Eurodance smash Better Off Alone. Tacky, tongue-in-cheek opulence accompanied these songs – at one point, a giant cigarette in a gold holder smouldered at the back of the stage.
Petras’s songs feel curiously two-dimensional compared with the decade-plus-old hits of the artists she reveres, like Minaj’s Starships, which played at the start of the show. Her performance was unnervingly well-studied, precise to the point of cold and clinical, a pop automaton – though clearly not without a degree of charisma, judging from the warmth and delight of the crowd.
Playing a maximally styled show when you’re not a Madonna or a Beyoncé can come across as flimsy and rushed: too much squeezed into shorter sets and smaller spaces, midsize venues stifling mainstream ambition. But for the Birmingham audience, success had nothing to do with tour budget or commercial dominance – in their eyes at least, Kim Petras is a star.
Touring the UK until Feb 19; kimpetras.com
