New pop heartthrob Conan Gray's sad songs make 8,000 Twin Cities fans very happy

During one of several dramatic moments in what was ostensibly a breezy pop show Thursday night at the Armory in Minneapolis, Conan Gray cut loose and really let fans know just how furious he was at someone in his life.

"They made feel like doo-doo," the 23-year-old singer seethed.

Even after his opening act Bülow dropped F-bombs in her closing hit "You & Jennifer" — as does his pal Olivia Rodrigo, who's due at the Armory in two weeks — Gray played it Disney-safe and clean throughout his 75-minute set. Still, his gender-neutral tone and messages of inclusivity did show a certain amount of bravery.

The fact that nearly 8,000 mostly Gen Z-aged fans showed up to see the rising heartthrob tells you how much he (like Rodrigo) he was overdue in town. His debut album, "Kid Krow," landed on March 20, 2020, a week after the music industry shut down because of COVID. Tough luck, kid.

In the interim, young fans cooped up through lockdown gobbled up Gray's bedheaded-sounding brand of bedroom-pop on TikTok and YouTube — particularly the downbeat single "Heather," which he saved for Thursday night's encore.

Just as Billie Eilish did at the Armory in 2019, Gray re-created a bedroom on stage as part of his production. His bed was weirdly walled in, though, making it hard to see him mid-concert as he sat there singing another one of his viral hits, "Astronomy."

Fans instead turned their attention to their cellphone lights and turned the entire room into a Milky Way-like spectacle during "Astronomy." They also helped things along by singing loudly in "Maniac" and covering some of the night's flimsier and rockier vocal parts by Gray, who admitted early in the show that he was a bit under the weather.

Gray is certainly keen on being an open book. One of his many confessional-style discussions was about growing up in Georgetown, Texas (a small-town-turned-suburb outside Austin), and feeling "super out-of-place" in his early teens.

"I wondered why I didn't look like these people, and why I didn't have the same views," he said. "I didn't know how long I could keep living like this."

The song that followed, "The Story," was a powerful anti-suicide anthem that also nodded to the pain of homophobia and bullying. Gray strummed it on acoustic guitar while his all-female backing band took a break. The clearly impacted crowd seemed to need a breather afterward, too.

With only one album to his name, Gray had to round out his set with a few songs nowhere near that compelling.

The somber, whispery tone he rides so well in "Heather" hit a dead-end in the piano ballad "Lookalike." Also, the rich-boys spoof "Affluenza" found him weakly edging on rap while rhyming the title with "wrecking Daddy's Benza." To Gray's credit, though, he didn't even cuss in that one.