The year’s most anticipated tour has arrived. On Saturday (April 19), Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s co-headlining Grand National Tour opened in Minneapolis at the U.S. Bank Stadium.
Not every artist has the benefit of kicking off a tour while occupying the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, but the TDE tandem are not like most artists. Not only is their collab track “Luther” in its eighth week atop the chart (its Lamar’s sixth No. 1 on the Hot 100 and SZA’s third), but it follows a long series of wins for both.
Lamar’s “Not Like Us” hit 2024 like a sledgehammer, an instantly viral diss track that rattled the streets and the charts in equal measure (and based on some recent legal efforts, it also seems to have left a certain Canadian MC a touch bothered as well). “Not Like Us” — one of the top hits on Billboard’s 2024 Year-End Hot 100 chart — returned K.Dot to the pole position of the Hot 100 in May 2024 after going No. 1 alongside Future and Metro Boomin one month earlier. Before the year was out, Lamar went No. 1 again (as the sole credited artist) with “Squabble Up,” another song from his three-week Billboard 200 topper GNX, which netted the sixth-largest debut week for a 2024 album when it arrived in late 2024. In February 2025, Lamar’s champion run continued when he headlined Apple Music’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, bringing out SZA for two songs (“Luther” and “All the Stars”).
SZA’s most recent project, in its various iterations, has spent 12 weeks atop the Billboard 200, originally as SOS and then via the deluxe LANA edition of the LP; SOS gave us “Kill Bill,” an all-timer of a breakup song that gave SZA her first Hot 100 topper as the sole credited artist. She’d previously topped the chart alongside Drake with the “Slime You Out” collab; while that one didn’t make the cut for the setlist, two other Drake collabs did end up on the opening night setlist: “Poetic Justice” (Kendrick Lamar ft. Drake) and “Rich Baby Daddy” (Drake ft. Sexyy Red & SZA). Wonders never cease.
Coming hot off two hit albums stuffed with smash singles — not to mention their respective catalogs, which includes a Pulitzer-winning LP for Lamar — there was a lot of material for these two to choose from when hammering out the Grand National Tour’s setlist. When the all-stadium trek (a first for both artists) debuted in Minneapolis, here’s what they played. (Some songs appeared in abbreviated versions, though most were close to full-length.)
