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Monday night at the Cal Coast Open Air Theatre, San Diego got exactly what the name of the tour promised. It’s Always Summer Somewhere, and for a few hours on the SDSU campus with the warm June air hanging over a sold-out amphitheater, it was definitively summer here.
3Quency opened the night, and if you arrived late and missed them, that was a mistake. Brianna Mazzola, Nori Royale, and Wennely Quezada — the trio formed on Netflix’s Building the Band, who won the show and haven’t slowed down since — ran through their catalog with the kind of confidence that earns you a headline slot of your own, which they’ll have soon enough. Inspired by girl group icons like TLC, Destiny’s Child, and Salt-N-Pepa, they carry that lineage without leaning on it — “Top Down,” “Once I Was A Good Girl,” and the recently released “Girls Talk” each landed clean in the amphitheater air, and the crowd warmed up to them fast. Three individual personalities bouncing off each other onstage, harmonies that hold up outdoors, songs that already sound like they belong on a summer playlist — 3Quency left the stage having made a few hundred new fans in San Diego.
Then Khalid walked out. What followed was something close to two hours of a guy from El Paso, Texas who’s been on the biggest stages in the world and still managed to make a sold-out amphitheater feel like he was playing for you specifically. He opened with “Motion” and slid straight into “Better” and “8TEEN” — the old stuff, the songs that lived in the headphones of every teenager who felt slightly out of place during the late 2010s — and the crowd responded the way crowds only respond to music that helped raise them. “8TEEN” in particular landed like a gut punch wrapped in nostalgia, and people around the lawn who looked like they hadn’t thought about that song in years were mouthing every word without realizing they still knew it.
The first major shift came with “out of body” and the cover of “Eastside,” both landing easy in the warm amphitheater air, before Khalid moved into material from after the sun goes down — the album that, for a lot of people in that crowd, represented a Khalid they were still getting to know. “Everything We See,” “please don’t call (333),” and “Adore U” carried that album’s defining quality — a sense of liberation that doesn’t perform itself, that just kind of settles into the room. He sang about desire and identity and love with a directness that his earlier records only hinted at, and the production, nodding at Janet Jackson and the polished R&B of the early 2000s, felt right at home under an open sky. Somewhere in the middle of the set, during “yes no maybe,” a girl in the pit section threw her hands up and just stood there with her eyes closed. That’s the Khalid effect. He writes songs people feel permission inside.
The second half leaned into the covers and the deep cuts — “Holding Back the Years,” then a quietly stunning version of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” that got a standing ovation from the reserved section, then “Saved,” “Coaster,” and “Cold Blooded.” He worked through “lovely” and “Love Lies” and “OTW,” pulling from every corner of a catalog that, stop and think about it, is now nearly a decade deep.
The Marshmello and Calvin Harris covers — “Silence” and “Rollin” — hit differently in an outdoor venue this size, the latter turning the whole lawn into something closer to a festival moment than a concert. Then came the closing run: “medicine,” “Location,” “Saturday Nights,” “Vertigo,” and “Talk” back to back, and then “Young Dumb & Broke” as the final song of the night. That last one was the loudest the crowd got all evening, which makes sense — it’s the song a lot of the people in that venue grew up hearing for the first time, the one that first made them feel like Khalid was talking to them.
He has said this album is about taking his power back, living in his truth, and being able to express himself freely — and that came through not just in the songs but in how comfortable he looked doing all of it. He wasn’t performing liberation so much as just demonstrating it, song after song, in a voice that has always been one of the more quietly devastating instruments in pop music. Co-headlining tours can feel disjointed, like two separate sets stapled together, but this one had a coherence to it — two artists who make music for people who feel things deeply, playing to a crowd that showed up ready to feel them. San Diego in June, an amphitheater at SDSU, a setlist that spanned nine years. It worked.
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