Charli XCX: Roskilde Festival

Charli went on at 22:45 and shut down Orange at 23:50. An hour and a quarter, but it felt both like 20 minutes and like three days. So intense was the energy, so extreme were her shifts in pace, scene building and volume. She opened with 365, By Dutch and Club Classics — bang bang bang — without a second warm-up. Just straight on and hard, as if someone had shouted “ACTION!” in a rave-themed porn movie.

And then there was Vroom Vroom. A song that, according to herself, is her absolute favorite to perform with — and you can feel it. She lights up. She turns on the turbo. She turns into a car, a machine, a mechanical bra-head with makeup and boots. There was no dancing -- floorboards were ripped out of the ground out of sheer euphoria.

It's hyperpop, but not ironic. It's girlpower, but not cheesy. It's queer, but not battle-ready. That's the whole package. And she's got her shit together -- she's on, she's in sync with every transition, she looks like someone who's arrived straight from a club in hell and is going to party you up in the face.

There wasn't much scenography. No dancers. Not a band. Only Charli, a few light installations and the sound of the internet boiled down to one long TikTok in festival format. And it worked. It was brutally effective. There was not an empty gesture, not a “how have you got it Roskilde?”, not a single false tone -- she ran it through like someone who had decided to dominate.

I looked around and saw the audience in ecstasy -- women, men, young and half-old, dancing in synchronous ecstasy as if this were the graduation of 2025-pop and we'd all read our homework. There was a sense of community that you only get when someone dares to take the reins. No moshpits, no bro-boys with draft beers and elbows -- just dancing.

The only small minus? The set could seem stretched. Some transitions got a bit long. As if someone backstage had said, “Pull the time straight, Doechii isn't ready yet.” And then one stood there and missed a little more pressure on. But Charli is smart -- she knows that if you just bog down the audience all the time, you lose them. You have to give them breathing space. And then smash them again.

It was obvious that Orange Scene was the right setting for her brat universe. All the drama was amplified, not watered down. She looked like a protagonist in a Netflix series you'd like to binge but didn't quite dare. Her costume choices, her moves, her timing -- everything pointed to the fact that she's not just a great performer. She's an icon in the cast. Someone who in 10 years will call her generation's Kylie Minogue -- just with the piercing and ADHD.

And how liberating it was that no attempt was made to hide the theatricality. It was all exaggerated. The mood, the tempo, the songs. It was both rave and opera, both TikTok and tragedy. And yet it was 100% real. It's rare that you stand in front of an artist who is both mega-calculated and utterly present. Charli balances it all — and that's exactly what makes her great.

Roskilde has had her ups and downs, and one could well suspect the program of playing a little too safe with her two years in a row. But when you stand there in the mud and get smashed Speed-Drives and I Might Say Something Stupid, one forgets all about curation and diversity balance. One just thinks: damn, this is good.

In reality...

... the most impressive thing about Charli XCX is that she never tries to be something she's not. She wants you to scream, dance and feel delicious. And she succeeds. She seduces without fattening. She dominates without fussing. And she leaves a room where you feel seen -- even in rain, in darkness, in the middle of a field, among 60,000 other people.