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Morning Spew

Jai Paul Returned to Delight New York’s Creative Directors

Pop's prince who was promised comes to NYC, and more links for your Thursday.

9:26 AM EDT on April 27, 2023

Jai Paul at Knockdown Center. (Hell Gate)

If the natural wine bars of New York seemed a little empty to you the past two nights, you're not imagining things: The city's creative class was being taken to ecstasy by Jai Paul.

At Knockdown Center in Queens on Tuesday night and at Brooklyn Steel on Wednesday, the enigmatic British musician delivered on the promise of his lo-fi pop in his first set of live performances in New York City, coming from his debut shows at Coachella the preceding weekends. After his massively influential pop demos leaked in 2013, Jai Paul fled the scene, seemingly devastated by the loss of artistic control. Paul didn't return with new music until 2019, and never performed live until this year. 

In Queens, arriving 30 minutes late to the stage at 9:30, the singer joked, "What's 30 minutes after 10 years?" With his face hidden behind a curtain of hair, and in a white tracksuit, he looked messianic. The crowd, dressed chicly in chore coats and work shirts, did not seem to mind. In fact, the energy inside Knockdown Center was white hot—I've never seen selvedge denim move quite like it did on Tuesday night. 

The audience arrived primly dressed, but left having worked up a sweat. The acoustics in the cavernous Knockdown Center softened Paul's already vibey music into a blanket of reverberation, but at the end, when hits like "BTSTU" and the Bollywood-sampling "Str8 Outta Mumbai" landed, they seemed to hit with the entire force of the intervening decade behind them, and got the associate creative directors gathered in Maspeth into an absolute frenzy. It was worth the wait.

Some more links for your Thursday morning:

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