Mitski at 3Arena review: a remarkable opening kick-starts a breathtaking night of melody and melodrama

Mitski

3Arena, Dublin

★★★★☆

Screams fill 3Arena and camera phones click into action as Mitski walks on stage. Beside her looms a huge and vaguely ominous red curtain, an enigmatic piece of staging that suggests this will be a pop concert with a difference.

So it proves. Stepping behind the shrouded fabric, the Japanese-American pop star’s silhouette grows and grows. Soon she towers over the venue like the outline of a kindly giant.

It’s a remarkable opening. She has, from a standing start, pulled the crowd into a spooky pop neverland – somewhere between the Red Room from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and the bit in Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights video where the dry ice machine loses the run of itself.

Mitski was hardly obscure before her rafter-shaking ballad My Love Mine All Mine “blew up” TikTok. In 2019, Iggy Pop described her as “the most advanced American songwriter that I know”.

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Three years later, she sold out Vicar Street in Dublin and supported Harry Styles at the Aviva Stadium. However, viral success on the video-sharing platform has elevated her to a new level of popularity. Judging by her gripping new show, it is a step up for which she is entirely ready.

“Show” is, if anything, too small a word for Mitski’s mesmerising performance at a sold-out 3Arena. As that huge red curtain falls away to reveal a gleaming spotlight, she dances, preens, and imitates a playful puppy. Later, she balances on the chair while miming falling over a cliff edge. It is a pose that calls to mind Bowie’s mime artist years or Talking Heads’ David Byrne in the Stop Making Sense movie.

What’s most striking of all, however, is the joy that radiates from the singer. Mitski suffered burnout in 2019 after years of non-stop touring. Yet she has put that ambivalence about live music behind her. This breathtaking gig is a celebration of her renewed passion for her job and also of her intense connection with her fan base.

Shy offstage, under the spotlight Mitski is a whirlwind. During opener Everyone, she holds her hands over her head and croons from the bottom of her soul. From there things only gets bigger. With her seven-piece band whipping up a stately din, she sways through the epic synth pop of Working for the Knife and, on I Bet on Losing Dogs, falls to her knees panting like an existentially conflicted pet.

She has not reinvented esoteric pop from scratch and her influences shine through from time to time. As the still lighting blinks on and off at the start of Thursday Girl, for instance, there is a worrying possibility she is about to restage the video to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

But there is lots of stunning originality, too. She smartly pushes through that big TikTok number, My Love Mine All Mine, halfway through the evening. Later, she delivers a dark pastiche of Nashville country rock on I Don’t Smoke – whipping up a Dolly Parton-esque storm with help from steel-pedal player Fats Kaplin.

Mitski signs off with an onslaught of melody and melodrama. The catchy Love Me More is an irresistible slice of 1980s angst-pop, while an encore performance of Nobody blends a retro disco groove and soul-baring lyrics (“My God, I’m so lonely/So I open the window/To hear sounds of people”).

As the song builds and builds, the audience roars its approval and Mitski and her band break into smiles. TikTok may have done its part to bring them all together – but the love that fills the room is much more real than anything the internet could ever conjure.