Fred Again..’s much anticipated tour made its way to the mile high city on Sept. 11 and 12 to the open arms of Denver’s most devoted fans. As a rising name in the world of EDM, Fred Again..’s newest album, ten days, was released a few days before his tour began, much to the adoration and excitement of his fans across the globe.
True to his collaborative spirit, Fred handpicked a local opener, Denver’s own Justin Jay, to set the stage, playing his own mixes of house music to welcome the crowd to Ball Arena.
As Justin Jay left the turntable behind, the lights began to dim, and the crowd’s screams filled the chamber as strobe lights began to pulse in line with their anticipation. Each pulse grew stronger and faster, shining over Fred’s turntable and edging the audience for the man they’ve long been expecting. The pulse grew to an everlasting white light, a heavenlike beam whose brightness exposed the tall, t-shirt sporting man that is the international DJ superstar. He rose from below the stage and took his rightful place alongside his turntable, smoke rising from beneath his feet and seeping out into the crowd below. His stage shifted to red, and cheers immediately erupted from the stadium as fans began to recognize the extended version of Guante’s spoken word poem that marks the beginning of Fred Again..’s “Kyle (i found you).”
A string of words appeared on the screen as Fred wrote, “About four years ago I started making a sorta musical diary from things in my life. So I called it actual life.” Shrouded by smoke and blending with the beats of “Kyle (i found you),” Fred’s letter to his fans encapsulated the intricacies of life that his music succeeds in portraying.
The allure of Fred Again.. is most apparent in moments such as these, as you’re immersed in the music just as much as he is: you feel the warmth and depth of the bass as it shakes the floor, red lights beating in tandem with your heartbeat as if you’re a part of the song itself. And to Fred, you are.
In a scrappy press release written on the tube about his newest album, ten days, Fred expressed the struggles and beauties of vulnerability in his art. He wrote that he doesn’t “regret being so vulnerable, in fact I’m happy… And I guess there’s also the thing of how many times I’ve been so moved by people coming up to me and talking about how that story helped them, and that helps me too. We help each other. It’s nice. It’s really nice.”
The tone of his show from there on was defined by this mentality, a collective experience between artist and listener, mind and body. Even through the lulling of the epileptic light displays, you’re only left alone in the dark for a split second, surrounded all the while by thousands of low humming voices and the constant reminder of the shared human experience. The emphasis on the humanity of his music continued with the set design, which featured an array of characters with an array of human emotion: a woman illuminated in red agonizingly chanted “I am a party inside of my head” in “(Sabrina) i am a party” from his 2021 Actual Life album, while BERWYN reached down through the screen to embrace the audience below him in “BerwynGesaffNeighbours” from Fred’s 2022 album USB.
Fred’s connection to the beauty of humanity wasn’t just on the screen: he prefaced his rendition of “just stand there” with SOAK from ten days with a story of his fans’ proposal at his previous show. The crowd was left speechless, hanging onto every word and every note as if it was scripture.
The emotional intimacy created by Fred’s storytelling transitioned into an electrifying atmosphere, the pulse of the crowd building up alongside the pace of the night. A woman on-screen seduced the crowd below her during Fred’s single “Jungle,” which progressed into “Rumble,” his famous collab with Skrillex. For fans of EDM, this transition from house music into the drum and bass hit was an awe-worthy moment that had the crowd watching with open eyes and levitating hands, especially as Fred played this compilation at his “battle station,” a platform emerging from the sea of Denverites on the floor.
Keeping his audience on their toes, Fred departed from the battle station and shifted from the vibrance of the drum and bass, lulling his crowd back into the warm embrace that marked the first six songs of his setlist. He emerged on the opposite side of the floor, bathed in a warm yellow light so that he appeared alone in the ocean of the stadium, his only companion his piano—and the thousands of fans watching him in adoration through the darkness. Fred’s raw emotion poured out of his throat and down to his fingers when he played his 2021 single with Kodak Black, “Kahan (last year),” “Dermot (see yourself in my eyes)” with Dermot Kennedy from Actual Life, and “peace u need” with Joy Anonymous from ten days. He sang, “I let you take a piece of me and I hope you get the piece you need,” the lyrics resonating with the crowd as they too could find solace in their vulnerability and let go of something that they once loved.
While the audience wiped away their tears, Fred snuck back to the main stage for his final songs. In between fan favorites “Sabrina (i am a party)” and “Marea (we’ve been lost dancing)” with The Blessed Madonna, the words “So make some noise for your brothers and sisters, blood or otherwise! That’s who this is for” appeared on screen, bathed in a blue light and highlighting once again Fred’s testimony to the power of shared experience.
His newest hit song “places to be” with Anderson .Paak and CHIKA from ten days had the stadium more than excited, as footage of .Paak and CHIKA played above the turntable, both artists holding the screen as if they were on FaceTime with the crowd below. “Hello I got places to be, like me next to you, and you next to me,” the song repeated in a whirl of exciting sound, reminding the fans of the unity that Fred inspires, and marking the perfect ending of a show that was dedicated to fostering this community.
Fred Again..’s mile high performance is one that will mark him as an EDM artist for the masses. The raw ingenuity of his music, the passion behind his turntable, and his dedication to inspiring emotion in the most collective form sets him apart from the drum and bass beats that mark the genre: he is truly something more than your typical rave experience, and a phenomenon to be watched as his popularity soars.
