I hadn’t heard of Noah Cyrus until a couple months ago when she popped up on my Spotify Discover playlist. I don’t remember which song it was, but I thought it was fine, nothing special. Then last month she released a single with Gallant from her Good Cry EP that I found to be really good. So when I got the opportunity to shoot this show last night, I jumped at the chance to see what else she could do.

Coming from a musical family, it’s no surprise that she can find her way through multiple genres. Her pop style leans more toward the bedroom variety than the bombastic bangers her sister’s released. The subtlety makes it more interesting, though. She’s trying to tell real stories, not just get the people up and dancing. She does that, too, but the focus is on the lyrics as much as the beats.

She’s an entertaining performer, to say the least. Constantly moving like a shark looking for prey, Noah roams the stage connecting with the audience with her eyes. The set is broken up into different sections, with a lot of the bigger songs up top. Then the drummer leaves so it’s just Noah and her multi-instrumentalist keyboard player. They do a few songs that really put all the focus on her voice and her ability to command the stage. If there’s anything she’s learned from being around the music industry all her life, it’s how to put on a show.

She doesn’t have a ton of material to draw from yet, so she played pretty much every song that you could have heard from her so far. The exception being “Almost Famous,” which lost the vote by applause to “Team” last night. She padded out the setlist with covers of MIA’s “Paper Planes” and Hozier’s “Take Me To Church,” which both got the crowd singing along loudly.

The Good Cry Tour continues through the month of October, with mostly west coast dates left. You can find tour info here.