Let’s Keep Dancing: Rochelle Jordan at the Paradise Rock Club 3/23
Design by Sophie Parrish
By Christian Jones
If you’re at all tapped in to the world of alt R&B, you likely already know her name: Rochelle Jordan. She made appearances on popular electronic-groovemaker KAYTRANADA’s 2024 album TIMELESS and the 2023 collab EP Lover/Friend. But if dance-pop is more your speed, you’ve likely already danced your way through her solo output—some of the finest house music since Azealia Banks got pseudo-cancelled for the nth time. Jordan’s sound is a sensual melange of genres, pulling from hip-hop, slow jams, drum’n’bass, and U.K. garage to make songs that get you out voguing on the dance floor and follow you all the way back to the lounge-heavy afters. Her third and most recent album, 2025’s Through The Wall, is her most infectious project to date, with a glitzy high-production pulse that just doesn’t let up. Neither, for the most part, did the energy of Jordan’s show at the body-packed Paradise Rock Club on Monday.
You would have thought it was a Saturday. The crowd was a cast of familiar club archetypes: indoor sunglasses-wearers, tube-top baddies, queers and queens, even a single frat-flicker—not a true-to-type Chad, more like his lanky, open-minded cousin. Maybe, I thought, dancing is one of those great human equalizers, like weed or thirst. For the show’s sonic pregame, L.A.-based DJ Chrysalis served a couple crowd-pleasing remixes. A sped-up version of Kendrick Lamar’s “LOYALTY,” a sultry, bass-heavy take on Solange’s “Locked In Closets,” a trapped-out “K9” by Don Toliver & SahBabii, dog barks and all. Each tack built the adrenaline, which was steady climbing with each anticipated beat drop. That is, until she played a baile funk remix of Frank Ocean’s “Solo” at tempo. The transition was so jarring that it made everybody around me look around and go “what?” Don’t get me wrong, everybody loves Blonde, but its freeform haze should be reserved for the bike ride home from the concert, not its preemptive climax. So instead of charging full-speed into Jordan’s set, the crowd’s momentum was stunted like a rollercoaster that peters out right before the drop.
The fifteen minutes before Jordan’s set dribbled by. The brilliant white light of a phone screen pierced through the blue hue of the room: the girl in front of me was ordering a Chicken Shawarma Wrap on UberEats. Actually, I never saw her press ‘Confirm,’ though she did look at about 7 different pictures of Shawarma, zooming in and inspecting each one before moving onto the next. Before I could think how hungry I was, the lights dimmed and the room filled with screams. Rochelle Jordan appeared at the far edge of the stage, her mane of gorgeous frizzy black curls spilling over a giant black fur coat. She sauntered across stage, illuminated by several vertical LED sticks, and slowly removed her coat—revealing a flowy white dress shirt tucked into the largest black belt buckle I’ve ever seen, its sleeves also stuffed into long, black leather gloves, and an untied bowtie adorning her neck. She opened with the breathy “TTW,” and each of her coquettish movements brought the sexual tension in the lyrics to life.
After her opening two songs, she did some well-received crowdwork. “Are you ready to sing with me? To dance with me?” she asked to resounding cheers, “you are safe here; you are seen here; we are one here. I know times are hard out there, but I want to give you something to lean on.” With that, the beat for “Ladida” started skipping and bodies began filling the little space they could manage with movement, bumping and brushing against one another. To get Boston to dance anywhere on par with the clubs of Europe is an impossibility, but as everyone shouted the chorus, “Ladida, ladida, ladi-ladi-ladida,” it felt like the entire room was letting loose. Though a song that is basically the lovechild of “1991” by Azealia Banks and one of the greatest house tracks of all time, “Gypsy Woman” by Crystal Waters, could make the stiffest plank bend. During “Crave,” the lights pointed at the audience so that Jordan, only a silhouette in the brilliant beams, could make striking poses. She coaxed Chrysalis out from behind the DJ board on the other side of the stage, and the two synchronized their hands—Jordan’s gloves and Chrysalis’s red acrylic nails making each gesture that much more mesmerizing. At one point, Jordan feigned applying blush to her cheeks in front of an invisible hand-held vanity, matching each swatch and pat to the rhythm of “Close 2 Me.”
As I locked into the sway of the girls standing next to me and watched the faces of everybody in the room repeat back to Jordan the lyrics of “The Boy,” it was clear they were singing about their own lives. “Ooh and my heart keeps telling me yeah/ and my heart keeps telling me fine/ and my heart keeps telling me now/ every time I see the boy,” they shouted in unison. Real or imagined, seven years or situationship, boy or otherwise, each person was outpouring the secret particularities of their personal lore into this lyrical stencil. Jordan’s sentiment called out to each of our own—mine included. I found Jordan’s music in the throes of my own situationship. She spoke directly to my passion and repression, that incredible dance between sincerity and avoidance. As she closed out her set, each song only confirmed this central theme in her lyricism. “You gotta spit it out, say it right now/ You gotta spit it out, say it out loud,” she and the crowd sang, as much to their imagined lovers as each other.
By the end of her set, she still hadn’t played my favorite song. But I had figured out her game: tension and release. After the crowd pleaded “one more song,” she came back out for her encore. A heartbeat. I was right. “Dancing Elephants” began, memories flooded in, and I sweat them out. “Elephant in the room but we’re still dancing/ Gave everything to you but you’re not grasping/ So let’s keep dancing, so let’s keep dancing,” Jordan sang, amid a chorus of panting voices. There are worse things you could be doing on a Monday night.