It’s less than a week to go before Halloween and Kim Petras’ Feed The Beast world tour has landed in Vancouver. In accordance with gay Christmas tradition, the crop-top wearing audience is also sprinkled through with a healthy number of costumes—as well as a few people in nothing but undies and harnesses, living their best hot lives. 

Opening act Alex Chapman truly just looks like some guy. The DJ also opened for Petras’ 2019 tour, and his delight at being back is palpable. But he’s also one dude with a deck, alone on stage, in front of a half-empty warehouse of possibly still-sober queer people at 8pm. However, he seems up for the challenge, spinning everything from mid-’00s emo (“Misery Business” and “Sugar, We’re Goin Down”) and camp pop classics (“I Wanna Dance With Somebody”) to Disney Channel throwbacks and contemporary summer bangers. By the time he’s done, the floor has largely filled in. People are ready to dance.

And then Kim Petras entered the stage via a huge iron maiden, flanked by backing dancers in leather and horns. The rest of the show only got sexier, and spookier, from there. Belting out “Feed The Beast” to kick off the performance, the first act of her performance had a distinctly devilish vibe—leaning into the theme with “Personal Hell” and her Sam Smith collab “Unholy.”  

When you find out that the stage show is based on Dante’s Inferno, some things make more sense. It certainly explains the strong hell vibes! It absolutely doesn’t explain why the show is in five parts, though, when the inferno is very much in nine circles. But thinking about it too hard seems beside the point. It’s camp, with a veneer of literary reference!

And anyway, the point of a stage show is to show off what an artist can do best. From high-tempo pop hits to belting anthems, Petras delivered smooth vocals, seemingly never once affected by any of the real-life effort of keeping your voice crystal clear. She stomped the stage commandingly, leaning into the camp excess of pop star life. She’s not much of a dancer, but when did we start expecting that of our pop girlies? She can pose dramatically, spin on a turntable, and even execute some short bursts of choreo as long as she doesn’t have to sing at the same time.

Act 2 was where things truly got wild, as Petras rattled through the entirety of last year’s EP Slut Pop. Re-entering the stage in sunglasses, silver boots, and classic business attire sans pants, Petras exuded Lady Gaga vibes, before a mass strip happened during “Treat Me Like a Slut’ and she ended up in skimpy lingerie. Perfect! From “Throat Goat” featuring gross-out close-ups of pink uvulae on the screens (and Petras swinging a ceiling-suspended microphone), to “They Wanna Fuck” grinding on every one of her dancers in every conceivable formation, Petras was joyfully horny. 

“Treat Me Like a Ho” (which implies there should be a third song in the “Treat Me” series at some point in the future) saw a giant VR-chat bimbo-fied avatar strutting around on the screens; at another point, Petras wielded a giant dildo-shaped bullwhip. It wasn’t not sexy, exactly: it was silly. After all, who needs to take sex seriously when you can instead lead several thousand people in chanting, “I just sucked my ex, no gag reflex/I just had to flex, I’m the throat goat”?

The next act saw Petras turn up on a giant bed in an orange negligee and just kinda hang out for a while. “Hillside Boys” featured Petras singing to Hans, her bi dom top drag king alter ego. “Something About U” was prefaced with Petras asking the crowd if anyone has any weed or shrooms, and featured writhing psychedelic tentacles as a backdrop—while she left her mattress to have more simulated sex on “Hit It From The Back”.

And then we carried on with the weird shit. Turn Off The Light, the collection of spooky songs that Petras released between 2018 and 2019, got a powerful showing here. Petras leaned into some pretty death metal visuals: lots of burning windmills, people impaled on spikes, and a gothy black trench coat that she whipped around as she strutted like an avenging angel. While the crowd energy dipped a little, it's clear this section was exactly what Petras wanted to do. For a girlie best known for her bubblegum dance-pop, it was a reminder that Petras is much darker than the platinum blond hair lets on. 

The final act took cues from Frozen and every other icy fantasy world, with plenty of fake snow and crystalline castles. The dancers were largely absent as Petras powered her way through “brrr” and “Icy”, before ending with “Castle in the Sky” for all her “EDM bitches”, meaning the final circle of hell is… winter heaven? 

Act six, the encore, took us even further from anything Dante-coded. The disco ball that teasingly peeked above the edge of the stage before the performers re-entered turned out to actually be the tip of a huge mirrored dildo. It occupied pride of place underneath a kitsch rainbow. This three-song closing section—which guided Petras to a staggering 30-odd-song setlist—included a trio of absolute belters: the Nicki Minaj-duet hit single “Alone”, the title track of her surprise freshly-dropped album Problematique, and her sugary break-out hit, “Heart to Break”. 

Wearing a crop top emblazoned with “I <3 my pussy”, and flanked by three hotties declaring “I <3 Kim’s pussy”, it was a delightfully cheeky end to an unhinged two-hour dance marathon.