Back in 2023, I got to see Fall Out Boy play at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, CA, and one of the openers was an artist known as Royal & The Serpent. This was the only artist on the bill that I wasn't familiar with, but I was so captivated by her stage presence and her voice that I had to look up more of her music as soon as I got home. A few years later, she released her first full-length album, Emptiness Is Godly. She hit the road shortly after to play the new music live for her fans, closing out the North American leg of the tour with a hometown show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. This felt like a more personal show for her, and fans were excited about the performance we were about to experience.

Opening the night was a music producer known as Bardo. He is the guitarist and producer for fellow LA-based band Beauty School Dropout, but this night he was taking us to Emo Night with a DJ set. Spinning some fan-favorite songs from our emo phases and remixing them to give them more pep and feel, fans could be seen singing and dancing in the crowd. It was a fun way to warm up the crowd and get people moving before our headliner took the stage.

As the curtains pulled back from the stage, a room was created on stage with plastic tarp draping down, encasing Royal & The Serpent (RATS) inside what looked like a Dexter kill room. A stagehand pulled away the front curtain, breaking the fourth wall and allowing us a clear view into what could be conveyed as RATS' mind.

Opening with "Death Do Us Part," RATS slowly spun on a lazy Susan platform near the back of the stage as she danced in an articulating form, isolating movements and moving in what felt like an inhuman manner. Stepping off the platform, RATS carried the uncanny movement throughout her performance, often walking or moving like a broken doll come to life. We quickly realized this wasn't just a concert. This was an artistic expression in music form.

Royal & The Serpent mixed avant-garde dance and movement choices with visual media playing on screens behind her to create a story for the audience. RATS used very minimal lighting, mainly only silhouetting herself, so that we could not see her face clearly. This helped to turn herself into a faceless entity representing the emotion of the music, and not necessarily a specific artist that we were there to see perform. We were only meant to feel the music.

Throughout the show, RATS would add symbolism through the addition of props on stage, like a small desk light and fan giving us a glimpse of what a sorrow-filled night of writing might have been like. A bucket of fake blood as she washed herself with it, revealing the stains of pain. Or bringing out a walking treadmill to try running away from the hurt of a past relationship.

Royal & The Serpent performed Emptiness Is Godly in order from track 1 to track 17. While performing "The House We Built Is Burning," she started tearing down the remaining walls of the room that was built on stage, breaking the shackles and freeing herself from this emotional prison she found herself trapped in.

As the curtains closed on the El Rey Theatre's stage and the lights slowly came up, no one could move yet. What we just saw was so much more than live music. Royal & The Serpent revealed herself emotionally and was so completely raw with us on this album and in this show that it took a few minutes before people could fathom moving from their spots in the crowd.

I saw a fun performance back in 2023, and that led me to a venue in LA where I got to witness a performer baring it all to her fans. Royal & The Serpent's show left a mark in fans' minds - not necessarily of a fun night out with live music, but of a connection to the human condition, marking the part of us that connects with love, despair, sorrow, hurt, and more. She didn't just sing lyrics, she embodied these emotions to present them in a more tangible way to us, and this is a show that won't leave our minds any time soon.