Maude Latour, the Philosophical Pop Star in Concert

photo via @luxxienne on Instagram

After the recent release of her first LP album and the end of her national tour, Maude Latour has officially established herself as the philosophical pop star. Latour’s album, Sugarwater, which includes twelve songs and several music videos to accompany them, proves her to be a master of crafting catchy and existential pop songs with exciting new sounds, lyrics, and visuals. My friends and I saw Maude on March 16th at the Metro Theater in Chicago, and she was just as magnetic and magical on stage as she is in her songs. 

With a set spanning from her first EP from 2019 to her debut album released in 2024, she played songs that kept the crowd dancing and jumping the entire night. This tour celebrated her album Sugarwater, some of her most refreshing and exciting work yet, loaded with electronic and alternative sounds of experimental pop. Maude Latour graduated from Columbia University with a degree in philosophy, which constantly shines through in all her work. Her album, Sugarwater, is a product two years in the making, embedded with philosophical references and thought-provoking lyrics. Her songs often contain refreshing electronic and psychedelic sounds with shimmering larger-than-life or diary-like lyrics that express the universal and inevitable feelings of heartbreak, love, and loss. Latour has amassed over 160k followers on TikTok, where she delves deep into explaining the larger meanings and references in her music, which work to celebrate life, mourn loss, and come to terms with the sobering truth that “nothing lasts forever.” 

In Latour’s opening song of the night, “Officially Mine,” Maude captures the exhilarating feelings of new love and the desire to be together. She sang, “Loving you is dangerous; I'll never be the same; they'll write bibles about us forever,” and “causе I dream about going too fast; something that'll last; a classics type of rеcord that always comes back; glitter in your hair, diamonds in your eyes; even when you tell me sweet lies.” Right from the start, this song lures you with its fast pop beat, colorful lyrics, and dynamic shifts throughout the song that had me dancing the second Maude came on stage.

photo via @luxxienne on Instagram

Personally, hearing “7 (interlude)” was one of my favorite moments of the night. It was a slower, sweeter change from the exhilarating pop sounds and nonstop dancing. It begins with a light, sweet sound that slows down the album and still rips your heart out with the raw, diary-like lyrics. It eventually picks up throughout the song and crescendos into a grand dramatic climax until finally easing back to the melancholy, sweet sound at the end. When she sang “Loving you despite that we’re running out of time…no I don’t wanna die, but I think we might,” these lyrics hit me in a way only live music can. I was in real-time experiencing a glimmer of that shattering feeling that “nothing lasts forever.” 

Another fan favorite from the crowd was Maude Latour’s “Cosmic Superstar Girl,” a song that both pulls at your heartstrings and has you chanting the outro at the top of your lungs: “Some nights change your whole heart in a minute; we were driving, and I knew that if I blinked, then I would miss it; it was fatal, there was nothing I could do except to live it.” Maude truly has a gift for summarizing grief, in this case, where so much love and loss can occur in the shortest of times, and the effects can still change you forever. 

There were so many thrilling moments in her concert, like the headbanging slower chorus of “Infinite Roses” and 100 Gecs-inspired “Too Slow,” where she has the crowd scream, “Samantha, get in the f***ing car!” My friends and I were having too much fun and never wanted it to end, but that’s exactly the feeling that Sugarwater encapsulates. Nothing in life will last forever—everything eventually comes to an end—so we must chase those joyful and beautiful moments of life, like seeing Maude Latour live, and “taste it all like Sugarwater.”