UPSAHL Turns the Heat Up on Her Triumphant Return at The Smell
On a sweltering Thursday night in Downtown Los Angeles, the 150-or-so souls packed into The Smell got something far more than a pop-up show, they got the first glimpse of UPSAHL's comeback. A full year away from live stages and eighteen months away from releasing music, the Phoenix-bred singer-songwriter stepped back into the room as if the clock had never stopped, and she made sure every single person in that iconic all-ages space was left breathless.
The Smell is not a room that forgives half-measures. Small, sweat-soaked, and fiercely DIY, the Downtown LA institution has launched careers precisely because it strips every performance down to its bones: the artist and the crowd, nothing between them. For UPSAHL — who grew up in a household steeped in punk before becoming one of pop's sharpest voices — there was something fitting, almost cosmically correct, about choosing this room for her return. No industry showcase. No hometown arena. Just a surprise, a Wednesday night, and a room full of people who refused to waste the moment.
She opened with the ease of someone who never really left, pulling the crowd into her orbit almost immediately. The air was thick enough to chew, and at one point UPSAHL paused to tell the room that the shows she remembers most are the ones where she sweated through her clothes. By that measure, this night was already going into the permanent collection.
But the moment that will live longest in the memories of everyone who was there arrived with the live debut of "Makeout," a brand-new song getting its very first public breath. Before the track even started, UPSAHL leaned into the mic and asked the crowd, simply and completely earnestly, to make out with each other. The request hung in the humid air for about half a second before someone — actually two someones, already mid-kiss in the middle of the floor — answered it. She spotted them instantly, called them up on stage, and let them continue the makeout while she performed the song around them. The crowd dissolved. It was the kind of moment that could never be manufactured, never be repeated, and absolutely could not have happened anywhere other than a room exactly this size, this alive, and this wonderfully strange.
The frenetic closer "Lunatic" — the breakup-revenge banger that has racked up over 13 million streams and sounds like it was built to be screamed in exactly this kind of room — brought the night to a peak that somehow still had room to grow. Halfway through the song, UPSAHL stopped, looked out at the crowd with something between a dare and genuine first-time nerves, and asked if she could crowd surf. She said she had never done it before. The crowd answered before she finished the sentence. She went in. The room held her up. Whatever invisible line still existed between performer and audience disappeared entirely.
After eighteen months of quiet on the music front, this show felt like both a whisper and a roar. UPSAHL has never been a timid writer — she has co-penned songs for Dua Lipa, Renee Rapp, and GAYLE, among others — but the confidence radiating off that tiny stage at The Smell was something more personal. This was not a calculated comeback rollout. This was an artist back in her element, playing to 150 very lucky people, and reminding all of us what we had been missing.
If this is what her return looks like at close range, in a venue that smells like history and feels like a secret, we cannot wait to see what she does with a bigger room.
Like what you read? Follow our social media and playlist for the latest in independent music:
