MINNEAPOLIS — It was the kickoff concert for the biggest tour of his Teflon-tough career, and his first of two nights at the Twin Cities’ largest venue.

He brought enough Monster Jam-style pyrotechnics and lyrics about trucks to ignite a testosterone epidemic.

And his mostly Gen Z-age fans were having themselves a good ol’ time, hooting and hollering and downing $14 domestic beers.

So what exactly was Morgan Wallen’s problem on Friday night?

The opening date of the forever-problematic country singer’s Still the Problem Tour struck a surprisingly mopey and melodramatic tone.

Forget “bro country,” a term applied to a lot of other brawny Nashville hat acts of late. This was emo country. A majority of the songs centered around one young man’s complex array of emotions, especially toward the two W’s: women and whiskey.

For a guy whose career rebounded from a racist diatribe faster than you can say “remember the Dixie Chicks” — and who could’ve wound up in prison for drunkenly throwing a chair off a Nashville rooftop bar in 2024 — Wallen seemingly should not have a lot to complain about. But he uncorked a lot of gripes this time around.

Donning a white T-shirt, light jeans and a camouflage ball cap — even his stage look was kind of sad — the 32-year-old singer started the show with one of his recent beef-filled songs, “Don’t We.” The ode to small-town, blue-collar life had him bemoaning people who don’t “stand for the flag” or “got that spot out in the 40.” (Wallen’s own 40 nowadays is a 1,700-acre parcel of woodland in his native Tennessee, which he bought in 2023.)

For his third song, Wallen launched into the song that inspired his tour’s name and mindset, “I’m the Problem.” Just one year old, it is already one of his most popular songs. And maybe his most petulant.

“If I’m so awful, then why’d you stick around this long?” he sang, one of many lines in which he almost takes ownership of his problems but then mostly blames his ex. “And if it’s the whiskey, then why you keep on pulling it off the shelf?”

He kept up that vengeful kiss-off theme in “I Got Better,” in which the singer blames his ex for strained relations with his mama and concludes: “I got better when you got gone.”

A lot of those more dismal tunes came off last year’s album, also titled “I’m the Problem,” a sprawling 37-song collection with stunningly little variation. Wallen managed to pull out some spitefully sullen tunes from earlier in his career, too, including the Diplo collaboration “Heartless.”

At times, the concert even felt like a redneck adaptation of Adele’s bluest material. Wallen is no Adele, though. He has one of the most unremarkable voices in modern music.

His micro-ranged, nasally voice sounded just fine in the night’s more bro-flavored songs, such as “20 Cigarettes” and “Ain’t That Some.” During the latter song, which edges on rap-rock, the stage pyro was turned to 11 — including fireworks that shot from the stage to the far end of the stadium.

However, the would-be fireworks in Wallen’s vocals during all those more dour songs landed with a thud, and his singing sounded flat and strained. At least he had nearly 50,000 fans to sing along and help raise the dramatic impact in some cases, such as his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up,” which he delivered on the smaller B-stage. The biggest singalong of the night came later in “Sand in My Boots” and “Last Night” as the show crossed the two-hour mark in the encore.

More problems with Still the Problem: The new tour’s giant V-shaped video screen behind the stage showed weirdly warped, two-sided footage much of the night. Also, a lot of the crowd simply couldn’t see Wallen at all when he stood off to either side of the screen.

Performing while daylight was still coming into the stadium, opener Thomas Rhett — who filled Xcel Energy Center on his own in 2023 — went over well with a much more congenial trove of songs.

Go figure: It sounded like the Georgia country music scion (son of Rhett Akins) actually likes women in such songs as “Look What God Gave Her” and “Beautiful as You.” Rhett was clearly loving life, too, sweetly mentioning the birth of his fifth child in February before “Life Changes.” Now there’s a guy who could be singing about problems.

Rhett will be replaced with a different warm-up act, Mississippi-reared “Wait in the Truck” singer Hardy, for Wallen’s second night at the Vikings stadium. Newcomers Gavin Adcock and Vincent Mason also perform both nights.

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