Addison Rae turned a rain-lashed night in Dublin into a full-scale pop display at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, stepping onstage just after a bone-chilling downpour hit Dublin 8 minutes before she was due. The rain eased as she arrived, and the show that followed had the sweep of something built to outlast the weather.
That was the reason people were searching for her name in Dublin on this night. Rae came in under dry ice and Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, then appeared suspended in a contraption that gave the entrance a cyberpunk take on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. She opened with Diet Pepsi, the song that has become her biggest hit, and moved and sang with the snap of a Gen Z Britney Spears.
The setting mattered because this was not just another indoor pop stop. Rainclouds had brooded over Dublin 8 all day before the concert, and the wind was vicious enough by the end to leave her with goosebumps. Rae had been back in Dublin about 10 months after her last headline show in the city region, and the show landed after her tour had first kicked off at 3Arena last year, when she had never played a headline show before that. This time, Royal Hospital Kilmainham was the stage, and the weather gave the night a harder edge than any lighting cue could have managed.
What made the performance work was the clash between limitation and swagger. Rae is not pop’s most naturally gifted vocalist, but that never seemed to matter as much as the joy and uncomplicated fun she brought to Money Is Everything, Aquamarine and Charli XCX’s Von Dutch, which she had also guested on as a remix. On Von Dutch, she climbed down to the front row, erasing the distance between the stage and the crowd while the wind kept pressing in from outside.
By the end, the show had answered its own question. Rae did not need perfect weather or perfect pipes to make the night land. She needed a stage, a beat and a little audacity, and Dublin gave her all three, even if it also gave her rain, wind and goosebumps.
