Skip to content

Arts

Read More ›

Exclusive Premiere of Fly Moon Royalty’s New Record

'Delicious Trouble' poised to gain the Seattle band the attention of a national audience

A black and white photo of a man and a woman.
A black and white photo of a man and a woman.

Fly Moon Royalty’s new record Delicious Trouble is a musical feast. It’s a delectable collection of songs that’s deep on groove, long on soul, and now has the band poised to gain the attention of a national audience.

Stream it now right here.

Blending elements of R&B, Hip Hop, Electronica and Pop, DJ Action J has created a sound that is both instantly classic and entirely contemporary, and Adra Boo’s voice is amazing. Her gift is the ability to give the most intimate, vulnerable expressions of the heart a sense of unlimited power and universality. It’s this quality that makes great soul singers so stunningly great. It’s what allows Aretha Franklin to say, “You make me feel like a natural woman,” or Otis Redding to say, “These arms of mine, they are lonely and feeling blue.” And its what allows Boo to say, simply, “I miss her, but she’s over me.”

That line is from the single “I Miss Her,” a song of love lost that paradoxically has one of the brighter moods on the record. The opening vocal hook, matched melodically with bright bells, is full of uplift and hope, but when the verse comes in, it’s a catalog of all that is no more: “no more text messages, no more jokes, no more talking until it’s out of style.” The wonderful thing about the song is that although it’s a lament, it’s also a celebration.

This sort of complexity is everywhere on the record, and it’s a large part of what makes it so wonderful. The “trouble” is the human messiness, the mixture of lust and longing, the inextricability of love and loss. It’s the band’s honesty and honoring of this human situation that gives these songs both gravity and levity.

On a track like “Grown Man,” (watch the amazing video below) the complexity is obvious. It’s a female voice singing a male narrative about working hard and coming home to find all his stuff out on the lawn. The gender flip makes implicit the collectivity in the struggles of love. The sense of blame is confounded, and the result is a deeper understanding of the heart. Stream the record here.

Fly Moon Royalty will celebrate the release of Delicious Trouble on Friday, April 22 at Chop Suey, with Breaks and Swells, CoCo Columbia and J-Justice. Get tickets here before it sells out!

 

Rearview Mirror: Godzilla, Cork, and a New Sushi Spot

Rearview Mirror: Godzilla, Cork, and a New Sushi Spot

Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).

POPPING OUR SENSES I don’t think I’ve ever given much thought to a wine cork beyond the satisfying pop it makes when opening a bottle, but after spending a morning at DeLille Cellars in Woodinville with about 50 other people, I have a new appreciation for it. The occasion was “(Pop) Open Your Senses,” a…

Best Bookstore: Beguiled Books

Best Bookstore: Beguiled Books

This Pioneer Square darling is easy to spot: pink doors and candy-striped details mark its home near Occidental Square. Beguiled Books started in 2024 as a mobile bookstore, making its way from table to tent to trailer, and finally to its current brick-and-mortar space. Labelling itself as “Seattle’s Original Romance Bookstore,” Beguiled specializes in just…

Best Art Gallery: Foster/White Gallery

Best Art Gallery: Foster/White Gallery

A pillar in Pioneer Square’s arts ecosystem, Foster/White Gallery opened in 1966 (then called Richard White Gallery) as the first space of its kind in the neighborhood. It soon gained notoriety for showing preeminent Northwest artists such as Morris Graves, William Morris, George Tsutakawa, and Dale Chihuly. In the decades after founding the gallery, its…

Best Museum: Seattle Art Museum

Best Museum: Seattle Art Museum

A vote for Seattle Art Museum is really a vote for three different art outings. The downtown museum pairs ambitious exhibitions with a global collection; the Seattle Asian Art Museum occupies SAM’s original 1933 Art Deco home amid the 43 acres of Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park; and the Olympic Sculpture Park puts art out in…