FOXBOROUGH — Over the last decade, Kendrick Lamar and SZA have established themselves as two heavyweights not just in their chosen genres — hip-hop for Lamar, R&B for SZA — but in popular music. Both are masters of the expertly deployed lyric, their clear-eyed observations refined to razor sharpness, then tipped with a touch of weariness over the world’s ills; those lines, and the detailed packages in which they’re delivered, have struck a chord with listeners worldwide.
The Grand National Tour, a double bill that stopped at Gillette Stadium on Monday night, could have been a victory lap in the tour’s titular Buick for Lamar and SZA, who are currently atop the Hot 100 with their wistful duet “luther.” Instead, it was a wall-to-wall showcase of two artists at the top of their game and a celebration of the bond that’s led to the former labelmates becoming reliable creative partners for more than a decade.
Lamar and SZA already proved they could handle stadium-size crowds in February, when the pair headlined the Super Bowl LIX halftime show with a 13-minute, 11-song sprint. In Foxborough, the two upped the ante, performing more than 50 songs over nearly three hours as they traded off sets and teamed up on tracks like the plush strut “All the Stars.”
Stadium shows can be a bit of a trade-off, with spectacle and sonic clarity often seeming at odds, but on Monday, each headliner’s lyrics reverberated throughout the hulking stadium, even as pyrotechnics blazed and dancers in praying-mantis getups romped.
Lamar, who won a Pulitzer Prize in music for his high-concept 2017 album “DAMN.,” fills his offerings with wordplay and knowledge, his moral clarity amping up the bravado that animates incendiary cuts like the storming “HUMBLE.” and adds weight to introspective offerings like the restless “Count Me Out.”
SZA, whose songs, like the agitated “Kill Bill,” possess the intimacy of bedroom pop and the vitality of show-stopping arias, grounds her withering observations on romance and womanhood in hard-won wisdom, as well as the occasional cathartic guitar solo. (“I owe everything to those terrible interactions,” she deadpanned during one of the show’s interstitial videos that was set in a hostile-on-both-sides deposition.)
Each set by the headliners highlighted these qualities in arresting fashion; as they paced and strode across the stage and its catwalks, whether accompanied by kinetic dance troupes or solo, they reveled in the crowd’s energy and their own mastery of their chosen forms. The generous pyrotechnics only added to the lively atmosphere, whether it was the fireworks punctuating SZA’s most flirtatious moments from the fizzy “Kiss Me More” or the flames shooting up out of the stage as Lamar recounted the most vicious lines of his acid-tipped mini-epic “euphoria.”
That track was one of a few moments that recalled Lamar’s 2024-defining battle with the Canadian rapper Drake, which reached its peak a little more than a year ago when Lamar released the giddy romp “Not Like Us.” The back-and-forth between the two rappers reached its final inflection point with that relentlessly uptempo cut, which packed lessons about the slave trade and heinous accusations into a party jam. Lamar had already been a pop force, but “Not Like Us” came to define a certain mood of 2024, and when it capped Lamar’s final solo set on Monday, Gillette Stadium came unglued as the crowd attempted to keep up with Lamar’s intricate, rancorous rhymes.
SZA returned to the stage for the night’s final two songs, both of which appeared on Lamar’s surprise-released 2024 album, “GNX.” The gently grooving “luther,” which notched its non-consecutive 12th week atop the American singles chart on Monday, was first, its well-deployed sample of the R&B legend Luther Vandross setting up its longing, which is romantic in the best sense: “I just wanna see you win,” the chorus goes.
The “GNX” closer “gloria” followed, and while SZA’s microphone seemed to short out at times, Lamar’s extended metaphor on his winding, still-evolving relationship with his craft served as a fitting closer to a night that plainly showed why these two artists are firmly implanted, yet hardly resting on their laurels, at American music’s pinnacle.
KENDRICK LAMAR AND SZA: GRAND NATIONAL TOUR
With Mustard
At Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Monday
