Harpy's Rock City support set won glowing praise from Gary Trueman at Devolution

Harpy's support slot at Rock City in Nottingham on 9 November 2023, opening for Wargasm, drew one of the warmest write-ups her live work has received. Devolution Magazine published the review the following day under the byline of critic Gary Trueman, and it reads today as a clear marker of where Harpy stood at that moment. This piece looks back at what he wrote and why it still stands out.

Trueman's central response was to her voice. He described it in terms that went beyond technical praise, saying it had a heart-melting quality that held the room. What he picked out most was the contrast within it: passages that drifted and floated sat alongside moments of real force, and he found that shift between the ethereal and the powerful far more compelling than a single register would have been.

He also paid attention to how the set was built. Rather than treating the songs as separate units, he praised the flow between them and the atmosphere they built up over the course of the performance. For a support act with limited time to make an impression, that sense of a continuous mood counted for a good deal in his account.

Stagecraft and audience engagement came next. Trueman noted a passionate delivery and a sense that Harpy was actively drawing the crowd in, and he described her presentation as slick, a word that signals polish rather than mere enthusiasm. Taken together, these points led him to the review's sharpest conclusion: that the audience had watched a performer with potential for something greater.

Read now, the review offers useful context for the act's live reputation. It frames Harpy less as a promising name to watch in the abstract and more as a performer whose strengths, a distinctive voice, control of dynamics and a confident connection with listeners, were already visible on a support bill. Devolution's verdict is a useful reference point for anyone tracking how her live identity developed from that night in Nottingham.