Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s historic tour

The show begins with Lamar emerging from the ground up in a black Buick GNX, rapping Wacced Out Murals. The echoey bass is equal parts cinematic and sinister. The stage is smoky, icy, thick with suspense – a fitting atmosphere for his blunt lyrics. “Fuck everybody, that’s on my body / My blick first, then God got me,” he raps.

Fire erupts from the stage every time he says: “Yeah, n*gga,” and it all feels so wickedly petty. It’s a strong entrance, befitting the man who, in a rap feud with the Billboard Canadian Hot 100 darling Drake, emerged as the champion.

GNX, Lamar’s sixth studio album, was made to be listened to out in the open air. It’s an ode to the west coast and to Blackness. His G-funk sound is punchy and his lyrics are intoxicatingly obnoxious. TV Off gets the audience up and moving.

Shortly after, SZA emerges from the ground in the same car, this time covered in bright green leaves, for their song 30 for 30. She’s the beauty to Lamar’s beastiness. Her set transforms into a sensual, ethereal, floral dreamscape as she sings Love Galore, Broken Clocks and her breakthrough track, The Weekend.

Dancers intertwine on stage while SZA laments about unrequited love, old love, secret love. Her singing style has never lent itself to great elocution: her words melt into one another, drowned out occasionally by loud drums, but when you do catch her lyrics, you can’t deny she’s one of the most original songwriters today. “Cursing you solves all my problems / Vacationing at rock bottom,” she sings.

Euphoria was the first diss track released by Lamar in 2024, when Drake goaded him and said “drop, drop, drop” after years of indirect back and forths. The song is rife with unforgettably comedic lines. (“What is it? The braids?” is a memorable dig at Drake’s hairstyle.) It’s quite a thing to see Lamar bring this six-minute diss track into a stadium: they are, by nature, time-sensitive – their main purpose is to cause instant effect rather than to age gracefully.

It’s clear Lamar made Euphoria not just to take Drake down, but as a lasting work intended to remain within his discography. Euphoria is at home here, preceding Humble, from his 2017 album Damn, and Backseat Freestyle, from his 2012 LP Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.

SZA is at her best when she’s fully immersed in excess, gyrating on the floor to a loud electric guitar or riding a mechanical ant as if her life depended on it. She emerges in the air at one point as a butterfly. She’s having fun and appears to be in her own bubble (perhaps that’s why the crowd reaction is, at times, less visceral), but vocally, she does her hits Kill Bill and Good Days justice.

The night is already unforgettable, before we get to Not Like Us, Lamar’s Grammy-winning nail-in-the-coffin diss against Drake. Throughout the entire show, Lamar has emphasised why he’s inimitable. Not Like Us was a triumph, and the crowd relish every bar, but the song could never have thrived in isolation.

It stands on the shoulders of his Pulitzer prize-winning, Super Bowl-worthy catalogue, which he exhibits throughout the night with ease and flair.

The true pinnacle of the show. though, happens somewhere in the middle. It’s Lamar’s rendition of M.A.A.D City, over a silky glistening instrumental of Anita Baker’s 1986 song Sweet Love. Dancers pop, drop and twerk as they encircle Lamar, who tells a story about gang violence in LA. It’s transcendental, church-adjacent and absolutely absorbing. Because most of his set relies on the original backing tracks, it’s the one part of the show that feels wild and free.

The switch between the two artists at times feels like the temperature going up and down, then back up again. But when you have two great lyricists going bar for bar, you roll with it. SZA is a surrealist, all fantasy and hallucination. Lamar is a realist, all concrete and bones. They share the space with love in this historic tour that is grand in all the right places.

Photograph by Cassidy Meyers