Oct 1, 2025 9:21am PT
Why David Byrne’s Dazzling ‘Who Is the Sky?’ Tour Is Essential: Concert Review
by Jem Aswad

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Indeed, “Utopia” is an extremely tough act to follow, and obviously at 73 Byrne is no longer the rubber-limbed performer that he was four decades ago. But the “Who Is the Sky?” tour, in support of his 11 th studio album of the same name — which began a four night stand at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night — finds him delivering a generous number of classics while revisiting and reinventing other corners of his catalog along with most of the new album, all delivered with yet another deeply imaginative stage presentation.

The concept of “Utopia” has continued — the bandmembers are mobile, constantly moving and again dressed all in light blue, but it’s otherwise a totally new production. There are now five dancer-singers, creating a mighty chorus and a more heavily choreographed presentation, and the back and sides of the stage are filled with a giant floor-to-ceiling curved video screen that changes dramatically with each song. For “Naïve Melody (This Must Be the Place)” it’s a bucolic forest; for “Houses in Motion” we’re moving down a nighttime city street with the taillights and streetlights increasingly blurring into impressionist images; for the new “Like Humans Do” it’s a bright white screen with Shel Silverstein-ish cartoon characters popping in and out; for “My Apartment Is My Friend,” we’re transported into his actual New York apartment (which is really nice).

Byrne and the musicians are moving continually through the show in intricate steps that are closer to marching than dancing (the dancers take care of that), with the man himself fading into the troupe when another member solos or is highlighted — and each of the 13 people onstage gets at least one moment in the spotlight. As he told Variety in an interview earlier this year, the mobility has “democratized” the band, and he revels in it without ever forgetting who people are actually there to see.

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So it goes until the middle of the show, when we get several songs from the new album, interspersed with deep cuts (the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” and “(Nothing but) Flowers,” his cover of Paramore’s “Hard Times”) and then the rousing finale as reward: a mind-melting take on “Psycho Killer” (which he did not play in “American Utopia”) that features the dancers in their most elaborate choreography of the night, followed by a driving “Life During Wartime” that is performed completely under sizzling blue lights until the end, when footage from the recent anti-ICE demonstrations is projected onto the screen as the dancers run around in panic (see what we mean about understatement?). It’s one of several low-key comments on the country’s political environment, the most blatant of which is a giant “MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN” statement in rainbow-colored lettering on the screen, accompanied by a mock Burger King logo that instead reads “No Kings.”

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