The last time I saw a show at Deep Ellum Art Company was in the Fall of 2023 when SE SO NEON ventured outside of Korea for a world tour. In between then and now, I met So Yoon of SE SO NEON by chance on the streets of Hongdae. So, I brought the tote bag I bought at that show for good luck on April 25, when Sasami Ashworth took to the stage to promote her newest album—and my current album of the year—Blood on the Silver Screen.

First up was Jia Pet, an as of yet little-known solo musician whose drum and bass influence drives her tongue-in-cheek, ultra-sweet indie pop sound. The preface she gave to her first song, explaining that it was about “the rice in a rice cooker having a party,” established a whimsical mood for her set. To emphasize her bubbly personality, she brought out a bubble gun during her performance and gave new meaning to the term “pop music.”

Sasami was accompanied by drummer Juan Diego Patino, who has a background in metal drumming, and guitarist Eliza Petrosyan, who recently toured with Chappell Roan. Herself playing guitar throughout much of the set, or otherwise simply providing vocals and dance moves, Sasami rounded out and spearheaded the three-piece arrangement, offering a refreshingly organic and somewhat stripped-back take on her music’s polished studio quality. The song “Honeycrash” kicked off the set in bombastic fashion, accentuated by imagery of fireworks; said imagery also appeared in the long sleeve I picked up at the merch table, along with the lines “even just an ember / can turn into a blazing fire.”

Sasami clearly enjoyed interacting with the crowd and seemed intent on finding out if there were any “freaks” in the audience. She punned off her host city’s name, asking the Dall-ass crowd to show its ass, a request befitting of songs like “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things” and “Possessed.” The majority of the setlist consisted of songs from the new album, but when she asked if there were any metalheads in the crowd, I knew she was going to play a track from her album Squeeze, which blends metal and pop with a variety of other influences. The “mosh pit” that formed during that song, “Need It To Work,” was … quaint—but the performance itself was energetic and enthralling.

The sheer catchiness of much of Sasami’s discography allowed me to enjoy singing along during a lot of the set, even though I only discovered her music about a month before the show. Songs like “For The Weekend” and “Just Be Friends,” whose themes dealing in the pain and passion of love and its limits are already hard-hitting in studio recording, had their emotional intensity dialed up by Sasami’s impassioned performance. Bending her body and making all variety of facial expressions, I could tell she was giving it her all for the crowd.

Before her last two songs, Sasami drew on her roots as a classically trained musician by performing an alluring interlude on the French horn. She used the horn as instrumentation on her penultimate song, “Nothing But A Sad Face On,” before saying goodbye with her final song—which is actually the opener on the album—“Slugger.” It seemed poetic to end the show with the first song I heard from Sasami; the lyrics “How come the things that are worth the most / Seem to be the things that hurt the most” seemed befitting of the end of a concert when the music is at its most powerful and passionate, and you want it to last the most—and yet, alas, it must end.