It's been almost exactly two years since Dua Lipa released Future Nostalgia, but because of COVID, she wasn't able to begin her North American Future Nostalgia tour until last month. In our fast-paced, fickle society, it'd be reasonable to fear that people wouldn't be as excited about Future Nostalgia today as they would have been if Dua could have toured it in 2020, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Dua kept the momentum going with a remix album and a deluxe edition, and the songs have proven to be some of the most enduring pop songs of the past two years. That was reinforced on Tuesday night (3/1) at Dua's packed show at Madison Square Garden -- her second of three NYC-area shows on this tour -- where Dua's songs already felt like classics, and also felt as fresh as they did the day they were released. Future nostalgia indeed.
Dua and her ace band played every song on the album, really proving that she's an album-oriented pop artist. Six of the album's 11 songs were released as singles, and the other five never felt overshadowed. The crowd went just as nuts for her Top 10 hits as they did for her deep cuts. It also speaks to how powerful Future Nostalgia is that she was able to carry almost her entire set with songs from that album. She reached back to her breakthrough 2015 single "Be the One" and her 2017 chart-topper "New Rules," and played other tracks, like her Calvin Harris collab "One Kiss," her Silk City collab "Electricity," her Elton John collab "Cold Heart" (with Elton projected on screen), and her Angèle collab "Fever" (with a guest appearance from Angèle herself), but she skipped over most of the tracks from her 2017 debut. As popular as her debut was, Future Nostalgia has always felt like the moment where Dua Lipa fully came into her own, and her MSG show was a testament to that.