(Credits: Far Out / Wolf Alice / Olivia Dean / Justin Higuchi)
Two albums in, and Olivia Dean is due to perform at The O2. On her third album tour, Icelandic singer Laufey has decided to scale up to a full arena production for her concert. Then there’s Gracie Abrams; plenty of people still won’t recognise her name, as she registers as a relative rising star, but now that she’s played arenas, there’s no downgrading.
On the one hand, it’s not such a sudden change. Laufey has a Grammy, and if the sales interest in these tickets matches up to the big rooms, why shouldn’t artists cash in? Perhaps this is just the way it goes with pop-adjacent artists, thinking back to career rises like Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift, both of which were already at arena level by their second album tours. But on the other hand, it does feel sudden. Arctic Monkeys didn’t play an arena until 2018, meaning that as a band, they were cutting their teeth for a long time in vital small venues.
Wolf Alice are about to make the step up. Following the release of their incredible new record The Clearing, the band are backing themselves and trusting in success when they decided to book The O2. The 20,000-strong room is an intense step up from their last tour, where they played Eventim Apollo to around 5,000. Sure, they did a three-night run, but even still, 15,000 people in a smaller room versus 40,000 across two nights in an arena is some jump.
All the good tickets for both nights are sold already, so clearly, the fans were there to warrant it. In terms of whether the band themselves are up for it, we won’t know until December, although the colossal sound of their new album and their recent highlights, like their Glastonbury set, seem to predict a victory. But really, is it an arena where you want to see them in full swing?
Here’s the issue: newer artists stepping up to big venues should be praised. We should celebrate that, an artist like Olivia Dean, a girl from London who has been working away at music since 2019 and who got a Mercury nomination in 2023, has finally had a major breakthrough moment with ‘Man I Need’ and her new album The Art of Loving, and is levelling up. We should celebrate that there is a new class of musicians climbing the ladder when, for a while, it felt stagnant, given that festival lineups seem forever stuck in 2011.
Perhaps it is not a question of whether they’re worthy of an arena, but rather if an arena will adequately show off their worth.
In videos of Gracie Abrams’ run of arena shows, something always feels off; her soft voice feels lost in the vast room. These aren’t songs that warrant dancing or are built for showmanship, so would a more intimate space not suit them better?
Or take Laufey as another example. The young star is bringing jazz to the modern age, so her songs have the theatricality, but there is something strange about seeing her work, which is so informed by tradition and classical music, all lit up in lights with a kind of Taylor Swift-esque stage set-up of moving platforms and dancers. Is it not just a distraction? Wouldn’t a theatre have worked better, or at least some kind of bridge between her 2024 shows in mid-size venues and her 2025 arena debuts?
Some artists can only work in an arena because no other venue could dare to hold them. Watching Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball is a perfect example of an arena show through and through as she unleashes a troupe of dancers, countless costume changes, several different sets and a career-spanning set list of songs that suit that. There wasn’t a single second where the varied annoyances of being in an arena, like the ticket price, the cost of drinks, or the annoying logistics of getting there and battling through crowds to get out, even came into play. I was so thoroughly entertained and impressed by the sounds and lights and the literal fireworks that the entire experience simply made sense. It’s a spectacle, as shows in arenas feel like they should be.
For the new acts taking their first steps into the bigger spaces, is that what they need to be preparing? Or are we returning to an era where high capacities are simply there for anyone who can warrant the ticket sales?
That’s something to celebrate, suggesting a return to simplicity where acts from any genre can capture an arena-scale crowd and new artists can climb and climb to the biggest venues. But the question still remains, is that really where you want to see them? The balance of intimacy and development is a tricky one, and only time will tell if these newish acts can handle the growth spurt.
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