A little over a year ago, Kendrick Lamar had a comfortable perch as one of hip-hop’s most popular performers, and also the most pious. Then came his monthslong quarrel with Drake, which turned into a referendum on ethics in hip-hop (and life). That led to the emergence of Lamar as a maker of tsk-tsking anthems, which turned into his leanest and meanest album to date. Then came a valedictory performance at one of the biggest stages in the world: the Super Bowl halftime show in February.
The outlier song on that album, “GNX,” is the SZA duet “Luther,” which has reigned atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks. It’s both sweet and dour, a love song that somehow romanticizes the obstacles that get in the way as much as the affection itself.
Despite the success of “Luther,” Lamar and SZA aren’t necessarily natural duet partners; they’re two complementary but not overlapping styles of sentimentalist. Lamar treats remembrance as if it’s a moral act, and SZA expresses a kind of agitation about looking backward. They’ve shared a record label and collaborated several times over the past decade — some good songs, some great ones, all of them in slight tug of war with themselves.
That added a layer of complexity to their current outing, the Grand National Tour, which came to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Thursday night for the first of two performances. Even if the overall song count tilted a bit in Lamar’s favor, it was in essence a co-headlining event: Lamar, his popularity at its peak, touring stadiums for the first time, while SZA takes a victory lap for “S.O.S.,” her beloved 2022 album.
For almost three hours, Lamar and SZA traded control of the stage, a few songs at a time, a conceit that gave the performance quickness and unpredictability. Sometimes they’d hand off the spotlight with a tender duet, little dollops of warmth amid the high-energy, boldly produced presentation. (Others have taken this trade-off approach before: Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan.)
Bursts of Lamar’s principled stoicism — which is to say, the long tail of his beef with Drake — were cut with SZA’s exuberant moodiness. Moments where Lamar found ways to communicate insularity on a grand scale were buffered by moments in which SZA turned playful and dreamlike.
Of the two, Lamar had to be more flexible: He had several competing responsibilities, coming off one of the most transformative years in his career. He began the show with some of some of the feistier songs of this era — “Wacced Out Murals,” “Squabble Up” — paired with some of his scrappier older songs, “King Kunta” and “Element.”
Each of his subsequent segments had some of this bellicose energy, though then tempered with contemplation. A stretch with the pounding “Humble.” and the dynamic “Backseat Freestyle” gave way to a sobering run of early career introspection, “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “M.a.a.d City,” the latter overlaid with a touch of Anita Baker’s crucial “Sweet Love,” one of the great sensual ballads of the 1980s. Later, he moved from some testy “GNX” songs and also “Like That” — the Future and Metro Boomin’ track on which Lamar kicked off the beef in earnest — into a run of slow-burn songs that underscore Lamar’s gift for somber storytelling: “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” “Money Trees,” “Poetic Justice.”
If Lamar was playing tug of war with himself, SZA largely had one story to tell — that of spiritual rebirth after endless emotional abrasion. Most of her visuals were about the cycle of life and death, often through the lens of insects, and toward the end of the night she emerged, sylphlike with wings, for the run of songs that best capture the way she extracts joy from drama: “Shirt,” “Kill Bill,” “Nobody Gets Me.” SZA’s songs generally benefit from the sort of up-close intimacy that would allow each word to hit like a gut punch, and at times, they got lost in the vast empty air of the stadium.
Lamar worked to stay grounded, starting with his attire. He was dressed in utilitarian chic — a camouflage jacket and long shorts, or patched denim, with distressed work boots. (The only contrast was the large diamond encrusted “X” pendant dangling from his neck.) While SZA’s stage artwork emphasized the natural world, Lamar’s veered to the hyperreal — faux newspapers with screaming headlines, a winking neon collage by the Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey. The stage itself was simple: huge screens at the back, some steps for Lamar to sit and ponder on, and a diamond-shaped runway out into the crowd that occasionally served as a platform for the stars and their dancers.
Lamar’s set list right-sized the role of the Drake beef in his career arc — important and perspective shifting, but not dominant. It also highlighted his subtle shift in the wake of the beef, particularly following “Not Like Us”: his move toward anthemic songs packed with grit and triumphalism. They were the heart of “GNX,” and in many ways were crucial to the success of his Super Bowl halftime show in February.
Not all the allusions to Drake were hostile, though. Lamar performed “Poetic Justice,” from 2012 — friendlier times — which in its original release was a collaboration with the Canadian star. And SZA performed just a touch of “Rich Baby Daddy,” a 2023 Drake song on which she appeared alongside Sexyy Red.
For artists like Lamar and SZA, careers are long, and yesterday’s collaborators can become today’s antagonists, or vice versa. But watching the two interweave through the night also made clear how competing visions of vengeance — stern versus anxious — can also land neatly side by side, or even be the same.
Grand National Tour
Continues Friday at MetLife Stadium, and runs through Aug. 6 in Stockholm; grandnationaltour.com.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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