New Music Was The Focus Of Skylar Grey's Performance At The El Rey

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It’s been almost three years since Skylar Grey’s critically acclaimed album “Don’t Look Down” was released, and her fans are rabid for a new album. It’s been reported that her album is ready, but without a firm a release date, her fans will have to wait patiently for the day to come, and savor those tracks that have been made public.

Even though the album wasn’t released, 2015 was still a busy year for Ms. Grey. With the songs “I Know You“ and “I Will Return” on the immensely popular motion pictures soundtrack albums for Fifty Shades of Grey and Furious 7 respectively, releasing a fantastically sensual cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love” on iTunes, and releasing the first single for her upcoming album, “Cannonball” featuring X Ambassadors in October, she gave her fans plenty of content to get excited about.

At the end of March 2016, Grey released the video for what I would assume is the lead single for her upcoming album. It is a tender, acoustic ballad that seems to serve as a personal reaffirmation of Skylar’s state of being with the mantra “instead of moving mountains, let the mountains move you.”

But with no release date confirmed, her fans will have to attend one of her concert to hear her new material, and they came out in droves to the El Rey to watch her perform an opening set for Atlas Genius.

I had read a recent interview where Skylar stated that should wouldn’t buy her last album because it wasn’t avant-garde enough. She must not like performing any of those songs either, because for the life of me, I didn’t hear her sing any of them.

For me, Skylar’s performance was an initiation into her current, musical state of mind. It was like discovering an artist for the first time, and I was in a trance trying to pay attention to each song’s musical nuances. Whether revealing her vocal power through an accapella number, or mellifluously grooving to the heavy beats of another track, or fluidly rapping verses with a stern intensity, Skylar’s performance was perfectly performed.

The only moment when she broke “out-of-character” was when she addressed the crowd to acknowledge that she was playing a lot of new music. She pointed out that there were a lot representatives from the label at the show, and she slyly suggested that the audience ask her label about when her next was album was going to be released. Daaaaaamn.

I had to leave her set about 5 songs early in order to interview The Young Wild, but her performance duties weren’t completely over as she joined Atlas Genius towards the end of their set to join them for an intriguing cover of The Weeknd‘s “The Hills”.

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