Shortly after 9 p.m. on a chilly Monday night in Brooklyn, ominous red visuals suddenly flashed on massive screens, signaling the entry of Kim Petras, who had stopped in New York for the 10th stop on her Feed the Beast World Tour. What they signaled, however, was a larger-than-life presence from a bonafide pop star years in the making — Petras’s journey to pop stardom hasn’t always been easy or linear, and is still in progress, but her live performances cement her as an ambitious artist with pop prowess to spare.
Feed the Beast is Petras’s first time touring since 2020, and it’s larger and more grand than anything she’s embarked on prior. By the end of the North American leg next month, Petras will have played more than two dozen shows on the Feed the Beast tour. Rumors of unsold venues have plagued this tour, along with online scrutiny about what her career should look like going forward, but at The Brooklyn Mirage, a sold-out, tightly-packed crowd left little doubt she had filled the Brooklyn venue to the brim with passionate fans eager to sing along.
Often flanked by three background dancers, Petras easily commanded the East Williamsburg stage, belting out track after track and then briefly vanishing from the stage to swap costumes as she took fans through her six-year discography. Bright and brash visuals appeared behind Petras throughout the show, sometimes reading satanic and other times leaning more psychedelic.
It was a homecoming of sorts for the German-born Petras, who teared up reminding the audience she’d started her career in nearby Bushwick, singing on tables at neighborhood bars.
With over 30 songs on the setlist, it was an Eras Tour of sorts for Petras, as she brought the audience through different sections of the show that was primarily, though not entirely, organized by past projects. She seemed to have the most fun on stage playing tracks from Slut Pop, her 2022 seven-track raunchy dance pop EP. During “Throat Goat” Petras sang into a phallic green microphone; at another point in the show, she confidently wielded a whip around the stage. She also had an obvious affinity for songs from Turn Off the Light, her Halloween mixtape released in 2019.
Petras impressively sang live for the majority of the two-hour show, and when she wasn’t, it’s because she was catching her breath ahead of impressive ad-libs or preparing to belt some of the most vocally challenging parts of songs like “Icy,” Claws,” “Everybody Dies” and “There Will Be Blood.”
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Technically, Petras has produced few hits by mainstream standards. You’d never know that from the cheers of the audience as Petras moved through her discography. Her biggest break into the mainstream came last year, when she was featured on Sam Smith’s “Unholy.” The song spent a week at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, making Petras and Smith the first openly transgender and non-binary artists to have a no. 1 single, and earned the pair a Grammy Award for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
But just how popular is Kim Petras, and is the impressive Feed the Beast tour the pinnacle of her career? Pop stardom isn’t exactly what it was a decade ago — the 2010s featured a variety of household name pop acts, while the current climate is more geared toward just a couple massive artists, and then everyone else. While she hasn’t been a hitmaker per se, Petras, who has more than 1 million Instagram followers, has cultivated a sizable following of largely LGBTQ+ people, who have historically rallied around pop as a genre.
And it’s worth noting her own status as a trailblazer for the LGBTQ+ community. Petras is the first openly trans performer to win a Grammy. Now, she’s embarking on this tour and has stopped in states that include Florida and Georgia despite the wave of ongoing LGBTQ+ backlash from US lawmakers that has targeted trans people and queer performers.
At a time when the importance of radio play has wavered in favor of streams, tastes seem to have shifted, and pop music as a genre feels more of a niche category. Even artists like Charli XCX and Tove Lo, who debuted with hits in the 2010s, have cultivated similar fan bases to Petras’s, playing mid-size venues to queer-dominated audiences. And with her Grammy for “Unholy,” Petras achieved a feat not necessarily reached by even some of the biggest stars in music.
And yet it’s not entirely impossible to catapult to major pop stardom this decade. Olivia Rodrigo, the former Disney star, quickly rose to mainstream fame in 2021 and is preparing to embark on a sold-out arena tour. There are nuances between the two, as someone like Rodrigo occupies a more singer-songwriter space, like a young Taylor Swift. Petras, meanwhile, won’t pull out a piano or guitar on the Feed the Beast tour, but she will slow it down for a power ballad like “Minute” or to rework and infuse emotion into an otherwise upbeat song like 2017’s “Hillside Boys.”
Petras released Feed the Beast in June, a pop album with 15 tracks, including the single “Alone” featuring Nicki Minaj. She calls the project her debut album, a dubious claim given her wide body of work — compilations, mixtapes, projects and EPs — released since she debuted in 2017 with “I Don’t Want It At All,” but it’s true in the sense that it’s her first full-length project since she signed to Republic Records in 2021.
She quickly followed up in September with the 10-track Problematiqué, which she had teased prior to Feed the Beast but shelved last year after it leaked online. Throughout her career, Petras has frequently been criticized as problematic, due largely to her working relationship with Łukasz “Dr. Luke '' Gottwald, who has produced and co-wrote much of her discography. Gottwald was involved in a near decade-long legal battle with Kesha over claims of sexual abuse. The two reached a settlement earlier this year, and Gottwald is credited on both of Petras’s most recent works.
But despite waves of backlash, Petras has forged ahead toward pop stardom, becoming bigger than ever, albeit smaller than what might have previously constituted the pop star label. Early next year, Petras takes the Feed the Beast tour to Europe, where she’ll finish with another dozen shows, further cementing her longevity and carving out her own distinct space in pop history.
