Review: Demi Lovato is deep in her new era at United Center show

Demi Lovato is madly in love, and she wants the whole world to know. On the “It’s Not That Deep” album and tour — which stopped by United Center on Friday — it’s clear the pop star is in her honeymoon phase with Jordan Lutes (aka Jutes), her husband of nearly a year, parading around endorphin-filled material like the equivalent of couples who Instagram everything. In her case, the first kiss, who will haunt who if they die first and TMI about what they do in Joshua Tree.

The love fest all came gushing out Friday night, just a week after Jutes crashed the stage in New York, where the couple performed their wedding song, Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.” There were no cute appearances like this on Friday in Chicago; instead, the 100-minute show was populated by sultry dance numbers for her latest single, “Low Rise Jeans,” and R-rated club bangers like “Fast,” all packed in with enough innuendo to go over the heads of anyone still clinging to Lovato’s more innocuous Disney days.

Now 33, Lovato owes nothing to her child star past. But she’s been channeling it lately anyway, reuniting with Joe Jonas onstage and posting backstage pics with Selena Gomez in the Disney epicenter of Orlando. She even offered to pull out a “Camp Rock” number at United Center that got a surprising rumble of applause from the largely millennial crowd.

The tease came during the “surprise song” segment of the night when one fan got to pick a performance from a former era, choosing from a bag of numbered dry cleaning tickets that matched Lovato’s coordinating past looks on a clothing rack onstage (the winner was a throwback to “Get Back,” Lovato’s first single from 2008). The theme didn’t totally land as Lovato never changed into any of the outfits. Nor did the cheeky “we heart our customers” tote bags at the merch stand that bore no connective tissue to the show itself, stylized like a dark industrial corridor with rolling metal garage doors that Lovato and five dancers popped through in a slapdash attempt at stage design.

Lovato’s nostalgia pangs felt bigger than mere substance, though, akin to Justin Bieber’s powerful reclaiming of the past at Coachella recently. In her latest material, Lovato is reuniting with her original pop roots after a number of years as the runaway bride of the genre. It’s an about-face from four years ago, on the 2022 Holy Fvck Tour, after she held a funeral for her pop career and announced the birth of her rock era, even nabbing Alice Cooper’s Nita Strauss for the run.

This time she had no live band at all, and while the pop backbone suited her well, the visuals and choreography were heavy on been-there, done-that pop tropes: the has-been stripper chair routine for “Joshua Tree” or the carbon copy catwalk strutting. Most off-putting of all, when Lovato started the night with the electro-pop menage a trois of “Fast,” “Kiss” and “Frequency,” it felt like a Brat Summer redux as her long jet black hair, sunglasses, a black one-piece and heeled boots looked like the spitting image of Charli. It just didn’t feel like … her.

The one non-negotiable differentiator continues to be Lovato’s voice. She has one of the strongest and most formidable sets of vocal chords in the business, with near Aretha moments on “Stone Cold.” An old-school power ballad like “Skyscraper” also felt more worthy of her range than the pip-squeak newbie “Say It.”

But maybe it’s not all that deep. Maybe you can just show up to this tour and have fun and dance along and let it all out. The “Lovatics” fan squad certainly did so on Friday night, showing constant adoration with sing-alongs on the energetic numbers and cellphone lights on the slow ones.

“It means so much to me to have so many of you here in this room, y’all are amazing and I love you,” Lovato shared toward the end, right before a stunning encore of “Sorry To Myself” that won the night. The song is a vow to love herself, after the hurt, burnout and pain of personal battles with addiction and mental health that she overcame to get to this point of redemption. It makes it easy to understand why she now wants to just keep it surface and dance the night away. After all that Lovato has been through and conquered, you can’t help but root for her happy ending.

Demi Lovato set list for May 1, 2026, show at United Center in Chicago

Fast
Kiss
Frequency
Heart Attack
Tell Me You Love Me
Confident
Low Rise Jeans
Fantasy
Solo (Clean Bandit collab)
Skyscraper
Give Your Heart a Break
Say It
Little Bit
Ghost
Here All Night
Joshua Tree
Get Back (Surprise song)
Let You Go
Stone Cold
Sorry Not Sorry
Really Don't Care

Encore
Sorry To Myself
Cool For The Summer