Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s slime green Sweat Tour comes to the Wells Fargo Center

Charli XCX is finally the star she’s always deserved to be.

The British songwriter and producer who — along with Australian singer Troye Sivan — transformed the Wells Fargo Center into a giant pulsating, strobe-lit dance club on Wednesday, started making her mark on pop music a dozen years ago.

It wasn’t until this year, though, that she became such a zeitgeisty lifestyle influencer that she not only gave a name — and a color — to a season of unapologetic hedonism, but also landed in the New York Times crossword puzzle this week.

The clue: “2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover?” The answer, of course is Brat, the four-letter word that inspired a thousand color-coded cupcakes and cocktails and was happily embraced by the Harris campaign after the creator of its slime green aesthetic offered her “kamala IS brat” endorsement in July.

For those who might think Brat should refer to a sausage, Charli — last name: Aitchison — has dutifully explained (on TikTok) what the very online intrinsically know: Brat is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it.”

Or in other words, as the electro-pop maven put it somewhat more concisely on Instagram when the chart topping album came out in June: “Brat is about doing what the f— we want” and also “me, my flaws, my f— ups, my egos, all rolled into one.”

So: Is Philly Brat? Of course it is.

What that meant on Wednesday was that a sold-out crowd made up mostly of woman and gay men in their 20s and 30s dressed in black and lime green and trademark Charli wraparound sunglasses, reveled in a 110-minute show that hit the ground running and never let up.

At the venue, fans posed in front of a wall that spelled it out in Arial font: “philly but it’s the same but it’s brat so it’s not.” If you don’t understand what that means, it’s quite possible you’re not brat.

On the concourse, where Kurt Vile was spotted escorting his daughters Awilda and Delphine, lines were long to purchase Brat hats and SWEAT water bottles.

With Aramark workers on strike since Monday throughout the stadium complex, some concessions were closed, but most bars and food vendors remained open. Calls from Unite Here Local 274, the workers union, for the performers to support the strike by urging fans to boycott Aramark vendors seemingly went unheeded. There was no mention of the strike from the stage from either Charli or Sivan.

And speaking of Sivan, let’s not give him short shrift. Charli might own the pop cultural moment, but the South Africa-born Aussie pop star was on equal footing with his touring partner throughout the show, and was a ticket selling draw.

Rather than one artist opening for the other, they took turns on stage, with Sivan kicking off the kinetic celebration of queer club culture when he appeared accompanied by a half dozen hard-bodied dancers on the opening trio of bops in “Got Me Started,” “What’s The Time Where You Are?” and “My My My!”

The two collaborators then alternated throughout the evening, doing two or three songs apiece as they moved about the minimalist postindustrial stage set with three stories of scaffolding and a catwalk leading to a square platform in the middle of the arena floor.

That was where Sivan, whose music is more melodic and less edgy than Charli’s but also driven by an insistent blood-quickening beat, rolled around on an oversize bed with his dancers, and where Charli made her dramatic entrance.

For that, she was hidden by four walls of floor-to-ceiling slime green curtains, which dramatically dropped to the floor as she opened with “365” in a remixed version that will be included on the deluxe version of the album due Oct. 11. It is characteristically titled Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.

“365 remix” kicked off a triumphant evening for Charli that came a full 12 years after she made her Philadelphia debut at a Making Time event at the Gayborhood club Voyeur, a year before her True Romance album was released.

And her emergence as a full-fledged star is a sign of the universe finally catching up with her, after years when she wrote hits for artists like Iggy Azalea and toured with others, like Taylor Swift, who she opened for on the “Reputation” tour at Lincoln Financial Field in 2019.

Now that the pop culture pendulum has finally swung her way, Charli has been expertly making the most of it; from her collaborations with Lorde on the remix of Brat’s “Girl, so confusing” to her Billie Eilish team up on the ode to undergarments, “Guess.”

Both of those songs were highlights — though alas, neither Lorde nor Eilish made surprise appearances.

It’s a been year dominated by savvy young female pop stars — from Olivia Rodrigo to Eilish, and Bucks County’s own Sabrina Carpenter, the latter two of whom are due in South Philly in October. And Charli, 31, is at the center of the frenetic and fun you-do-you feminist ethos.

Wednesday’s show was a pulsating burst of electric disco and techno energy, with Sivan’s segments celebrating queer love shadowed by his sinewy dancers, eliciting cheers of delight as he lingered with one for a wet kiss late in the show.

Sivan, who called his co-headliner “the hottest b— in the world,” moved on stage as part of a collective throughout the evening, which was fast paced to a fault, seamless in its pass-the-baton execution but perhaps in need of an occasional tempo shifting, chilled-out interlude.

Charli, by contrast, prowled the stage alone, usually only shadowed by a cameraperson capturing her every strut. She doesn’t dance as well as Sivan, but made up for it with an Olympian-level swagger, whether stripping down to her skivvies on the ever-accelerating “Vroom Vroom” or leading the crowd in an exultant “I Love It.”

That’s the Charli XCX song that people know even if they don’t know who Carli XCX is, because the 2012 version by Icona Pop is blasted at sporting events everywhere. Charli wrote the “I don’t care/ I love it!” hook and at the Wells Fargo Center, she took it back from the Swedish synth-pop duo and made it entirely her own.

Just as Brat Summer had been, all season long, and continued to be on Wednesday, three nights into autumn.

Here’s the set list for Charli XCX and Troye Sivan at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Sept. 25, 2024.

“Got Me Started”

“What’s The Time Where You Are?”

“My My My!”

“365 remix”

“360″

“Von dutch”

“In My Room”

“Dance to This”

“Rager teenager!”

“Club classics”

“Unlock it (Lock It)”

“Sympathy is a knife”

“Guess”

“Bloom”

“Spring breakers”

“Girl, so confusing”

“One Of Your Girls”

Charli XCX

“Everything is romantic”

“Speed Drive”

“Apple”

“Silly”

“You”

“STUD”

“365″

“Vroom Vroom”

“1999″

“Track 10″

“I Love It”

“Honey”

“Rush”

“Talk talk”