Nyssa w/Loveland, Yohvn Blvck
Wed, Aug 7, 9pm
Menz & Mollyz Bar, 2182 Gottingen Street
Rock and roll is not dead—at least when Nyssa is on stage.
"I try to be more rock-and-roll on stage than soft-spoken," says Nyssa Rosaleen, the solo star of the danceable glam rock project simply called Nyssa. "There's a lot of fists in the air and power moves."
It may be just her on stage with a backing track, but with it Nyssa pulls in the audience with energy and volume.
Since releasing the Champions of Love EP in 2018, the Toronto artist has released a string of singles, with more on the way as she works towards a full-length album. In the new songs, the theme of a woman outlaw runs throughout.
"It's not in this old Wild West sort of way. I'm really drawn to the idea of a woman not following the rules and living on the fringes," says Rosaleen.
The new songs draw on inspiration from women songwriters, fiction writers and filmmakers. A few years ago, she read an article about a lack of female road narratives, so in a way she's flipping the script and filling a void.
With an astute awareness of rock and roll history, Nyssa is like a walking history lesson that's simultaneously two steps ahead in the future.
"The interest that I have is going back to the very beginning and trying to figure out how that energy rips it way throughout the entire history of rock and roll from Elvis to Bonnie Tyler to, I don't know, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs," she says. "I think the energy is this really important, powerful thing. I think it's been lost a bit. I don't think it's about guitars and I don't think it's about drum solos. I think it's about this kind of fuck-the-world energy."
