But if aggressive deep horniness is your thing, McRae had it to spare in Boston Tuesday night.
Tate McRae, here performing in Los Angeles last year, got hot and bothered at TD Garden Tuesday. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
August 27, 2025 | 1:49 PM
3 minutes to read
Tate McRae, with Zara Larsson, at TD Garden, Boston, Tuesday, Aug. 26.
A lot of artists tell audiences that their city is special. Tate McRae had the song to prove it: “Think Later,” with Boston right there in the lyrics and written about what the singer called a crazy night that she spent in the Hub. The timeline would suggest that it followed one of the two times she’d performed at the TD Garden as part of the revolving-door roster of the annual Jingle Ball Christmas concert.
So when McRae took the Garden stage on Tuesday, she was returning to a venue she’d played before. But the concert — the first of two sold-out nights, with a third scheduled for October — marked a distinct leveling up for the pop star, her first time headlining the place and thus having to prove herself for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. And while splitting her 95-minute show into five separate acts might have argued that she knows how long she’s good for before she needs a reset, the entirety of it suggested that McRae has assembled a lot of the ingredients needed to be a fully self-sufficient pop star, but might not know how to put them together to become the total package.
The concert began with a video of McRae sitting at a bank of monitors watching real-time audience cams in the Garden, and when she came out to the thick, heavy glare of “Miss Possessive,” she turned the tables quickly. A great deal of her performance was directed at the cameras and not the audience in the room with her, concerned with how it would look on the giant video screens rather than on the stage in the open air. She spent much of “Like I Do” writhing under the band riser that was designed to look like construction scaffolding, and she threw come-hither eyes at the camera during the sultry boom of “Purple Lace Bra.” In more than one song, her back was to the crowd entirely so she could emote directly into the lens.
McRae kept her material at arm’s length in other ways as well. In “Sports Car,” “It’s OK I’m OK” and more, she spent a great deal of time not singing, spotlighting the choreography instead and letting either the backing tracks or the crowd handle the words. The result was that the audience was substantially watching someone dance her hits rather than sing them. As skilled as McRae was on that front — her reality-television origin story wasn’t a singing competition like American Idol or The Voice but So You Think You Can Dance — it betrayed the fact that if she wasn’t going to do both things at once in person, the thing that folks could hear on Spotify would have to be the one to go.
McRae was perfectly capable of being an affecting singer when she put her mind to it. She was at her best showing a little more vulnerability in songs like “Greenlight” and “Nostalgia,” the latter of which had a soft, steely intensity reminiscent of Gracie Abrams. She could maintain that even when the songs turned whomping, as when the whole arena wallowed in the apocalyptic heartbreak of “You Broke Me First” and the fleet-footed self-loathing of “She’s All I Wanna Be,” where McRae’s voice seemed to be just short of cracking, holding together through sheer willpower.
But McRae’s dominant mode trafficked in songs that led with a far more aggressive deep horniness. The low buzz and hum of “Uh Oh” began with the singer pole dancing and climaxed in the pansexual fondling of her eight-person dance crew surrounding her, while “Sports Car,” “Greedy” and “It’s OK I’m OK” were pure ultra-frisky flirtation. “2 Hands” might have been more of the same, but the song was markedly more compelling thanks to its internalization of how hot and bothered the singer was. It successfully married all the various facets of McRae that she would spend the rest her concert working hard to keep separate from one another.
Sometime during her 45-minute opening set, Zara Larsson told the crowd “I love the energy” despite not offering much of it herself. Alone onstage with four dancers, she presented an empty coolness in a performance of squelching club tracks delivered with a voice that she seemed only to know how to deploy with full arc-welder heat.
Setlist for Tate McRae at TD Garden, Aug. 26, 2025
Miss Possessive
No I’m Not In Love
2 Hands
Guilty Conscience
Purple Lace Bra
Like I Do
Uh Oh
Dear God
Siren Sounds
Greenlight
Nostalgia
Medley: That Way / One Day / Feel Like Sh— / Think Later
You Broke Me First
Run For The Hills
Exes
Bloodonmyhands
She’s All I Wanna Be
Revolving Door
It’s OK I’m OK
ENCORE:
Just Keep Watching
Sports Car
Greedy
Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.
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