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.