Royal & The Serpent joined PVRIS for her very first tour, which will conclude in her hometown of Los Angeles at the end of this week.
She made her debut in 2017, earning acclaim for a series of self-released singles such as “MMXX,” “Salvador Dali,” and “Bad Bad Blood”, which was featured in the Season 6 trailer for ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder. Her rise to fame began after exploding in the TikTok realm with her Atlantic Records debut in 2020, “overwhelmed.” The track spent 22 weeks on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart and has amassed nearly 100 million streams on Spotify alone.
In each piece of music she shares with the world, Royal reveals the wild duality at the heart of her artistry and speaks to the incredible power of embracing your true nature, in all its outrageous complexity. A Gemini to the core, she’s passionate but pensive, sensitive but self-possessed, enigmatic but an open book when it comes to exposing what’s inside her mind.
“I definitely feel like I’m two people living in one body, where I can just slip at the drop of dime and become a totally different person,”
~ Ryan Santiago | Royal & The Serpent
Santiago equally identifies as a “sweet sunshine angel” and a “freaky devil maniac”, and owns both the unhinged, crazed spirit of the “serpent” while talking sweetly and gently and kindly to her crowd and band members who joined her onstage as the “royal” persona. You see them both collaborate with one another equally from within one body and one mind. As she entered the stage, she grinned ear to ear as she lured the crowd in with her sticky sweet speaking voice.
“What’s up everybody?” she asked, and the Ace of Spades crowd cheered.
Sacramento welcomed her with open arms on Monday, August 30th; pulled into her musical grip to the point of stillness as they hummed the tunes of each of her tracks and she played the stage with her best friends and fellow musicians, The Beauty School Dropouts. While it was her tour, nearly as much as it was PVRIS’s headlining series of performances over the US, Royal highlighted her fellow bandmates as if they were her own family.
“Beauty School Dropouts are some of my best friends that have joined me on tour,” she said as she embraced them, then they began to play the band’s new song, “Starphucker,” where they took the center stage as she harmonized throughout their performance.
And during her entire set, she danced with her best friends as if they were playing alone in a studio or jamming in their garage, which made for the scene of an energetic and lighthearted set as she broke apart all the raw concepts behind mental health and the push-and-pull through toxic relationships. And just as the set was beginning to cool down, Royal & The Serpent concluded her part of the show with “overwhelmed,” singing with an ease as you could sense the music coursing through her bones as she poured it all out for the crowd who eagerly watched and sang along.
On the heels of their epic synth-driven banger. “Monster,” alt-pop giants PVRIS are back on the road this fall on their U.S. headline tour, critics named a “Can’t Miss Tour of Summer/Fall 2021.” Last year, PVRIS marked a new era with the release of Use Me, as frontwoman, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer. Lynn Gunn confidently stepped forward as PVRIS’ leader and sole architect, earning acclaim worldwide. That newfound sense of freedom defined the record, on which Lynn wrote, played the entirely of the guitar, drums, and bass parts, cooked up beats, and of course, sang vocals. Awash in glitchy beat-craft, airy guitars, and spell-binding vocals, the 11-track record included 070 Shake collaboration “Use Me,” explosive song “Hallucinations” plus “Dead Weight,””Death of Me” and “Gimme A Minute,” all brought to life by producer JT Daly [K. Flay].
PVRIS’s performance highlighted Gunn’s powerful vocals. As the powerhouse rocked the stage with their guitar playing and emotionally ridden performance.
“I have some facts about Sacramento if you wanna hear it,” they said gently to the crowd. Waiting patiently for the quiet to come, they continued. “It was where I did the first performance ever. We also performed a s**t ton of music videos here. Sacramento… I love you.” The crowd then went wild.
Stay tuned for more updates regarding Royal & The Serpent and PVRIS! Watch our full interview with Royal & The Serpent, and read our review of her latest EP, searching for nirvana, here. See the full gallery of photos from Royal’s performance, coming soon.
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