Noah Kahan wakes up his faithful at the Hollywood Bowl

There's screaming at concerts, and then there's the noise the young crowd made at Noah Kahan's show at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday night.

There, Kahan, a 27-year-old folk singer from Vermont who captured TikTok's Gen Z romantics, had almost all of his plaintive lyrics screamed at him. It was Eras-caliber visceral catharsis, even in the quiet parts (perhaps especially in the quiet parts). No Vermonter has been greeted with such arena-rock delirium since Bernie Sanders.

Listening to Kahan's Stick Season 2022 LP, which earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, you might not expect this kind of reaction. It's an intimate, twisted record, full of lyrical details and fingerings specific to his life and his autumnal hometown. His stage setup at the Bowl included a recreation of his childhood living room.

But every few years, pop gets its Dashboard Confessional moment on MTV Unplugged, a new singer-songwriter who transcends everything else on the charts and nails something in the ready hearts of young people. This is Kahan's season for such a feat.

Kahan, a bearded and disarmingly candid songwriter with a very cute dog in his album art and a mental health charity called Busyhead Project, signed with Republic in 2017. He released a pair of LPs that did not reach a mass audience. But he did a smart thing with the single Stick Season, teasing very early versions of it on TikTok in late 2020 that depicted the melancholy of returning to campus in a difficult time (I'm terrified of the weather because I see you when it it's raining / Doc told me to travel, but there's COVID on the planes.)

Upon release in 2022, the single reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album peaked at #2 on the Hot 200, with a significantly expanded edition released in February as momentum built. Kahan was an astute collaborator, making guest appearances or co-writing with Post Malone, Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile and Hozier. Olivia Rodrigo covered it. If your algorithm has ever detected an interest in romantic fingering, you've found your way to Noah Kahan.

He is criticized for allegedly reviving the indie-folk stomp-clap music popularized by Mumford & Sons in the 2010s. This comparison is unfair, however, given that country music is now invading every other genre. At the Bowl on Thursday, tens of thousands of very young fans found their own Americana in the Internet age.

From opener Dial Drunk, a very good drunken ballad for a generation renouncing alcohol, Kahan created a Springsteen-caliber tradition for himself and his hometown.

Sporting Willie Nelson braids and looking darkly endearing with his jokes (Kids of divorce here? Let me hear you say daddy's house is empty and weird.), Kahan was brutally sincere in his music , but erased on its new pop status. star.

He could play a song like Forever, where he longs for the limits of your soul that I haven't yet seen, and immediately joke that I feel like a manipulative youth pastor. As if Jesus had rice.

The specifics of Kahan's aesthetic, the trees emptied of their greenery, the childhood homes dripping with trauma, the alcohol soaked during a freezing winter are the real hook for the devoted. A New England schoolbook object became a sort of cowboy symbol on Paul Revere, and in Come Over he paid special attention to the place that made it so, my house was designed to sound a bit like her crying / When they mention the sad child in a sad house on Balch Street / You won't have to guess who they're talking about.

He’s a gifted musician underneath it all. Kahan unleashed a lovely falsetto on You're Gonna Go Far and got really heavy on a heartbreaking The Great Divide. He convincingly addressed adult concerns in Orange Juice, where the shame of new sobriety took on deep weight in the details. There is orange juice in the kitchen, bought for the kids / It's yours if you want it, we're just happy to be able to visit.

Kahans is old enough to want a place in the songwriter canon, but still somewhat tied to the college melodrama that made him famous.

There's no time limit on being mad at my parents for what their parents did to them, as he sang on Growing Sideways, but there was something a little too opinionated about taking a lone microphone in the middle of the audience to sing about how he took my meds and poured out my trauma / on a new leather couch that was too expensive for a sad-eyed middle-aged man. Everyone in this well-therapeutic crowd probably had this conversation, and Kahan knew to hit them where they lived.

For now, Kahan is treading an intriguing path between country music's revival, TikTok's sense of success, and an ultra-intense fan culture. Thursday's show proved why he happened to be well-honed and self-aware at his craft, distinguishing the difference between Taylor Swift's world-building and Conor Oberst's majestic wretchedness. Is it for the ages? Maybe one day. But Noah Kahan, a real pop star today? It's worth stomping and applauding.