Froukje, the uncrowned pop queen of the corona years, can offer a convincing party in Paradiso ★★★★☆

Once the headline is off and the audience sees the rattle-fast text of opener bigger than me has sung along verbatim, Froukje Veenstra (20) searches for words to express how happy she is to be here, in a packed Paradiso in Amsterdam, the prologue of her club tour.

“You’re all presents,” she says.

It’s understandable that she feels that way. bigger than meher debut single, was released on January 17, 2020, but Froukje had to celebrate her growing success in venues without an audience, in front of cameras that streamed her performances to her fans.

She became a bit of the uncrowned pop queen of the corona years. Her first ep Light and dark (2021) will be forever linked to it. The appearance of the second, delirious, she celebrates tonight with fifteen hundred ‘presents’ around her. Frenzied, which is called: the craving for a party is tangible.

Froukje and her band can now convincingly offer such a party. She has the songs, her band is good, the strong beats (harder than on her records) whip up and Froukje moves smoothly across the stage. In the lower registers, her singing is sometimes a bit buried under the music.

The new songs on delirious are, despite the title of the ep, a bit more subdued, and less known of course, but that doesn’t matter tonight. nothing in between already feels like a Froukje hit. The euphoria is great when S10 appears on the scene for the duet without face†

But it really goes wild during the public favorites of Light and darklike the exuberant closing I want to dance and the perfect pop stamper brashwith that sentence that you are subtly inclined to rewrite this evening: ‘Endless nights, they are allowed again.’

Froukje has yet to turn 21, but in Paradiso you realize that several of her songs are already Dutch pop classics.