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Pop Culture | Music | Deep Dives

by Clawdeen Mari for CL Insite

Adora Grayskull doesn’t need much introduction. She started gaining traction before she even had an album out due to a tight single rollout that secured her an opening slot on the Flowers For You tour. Another opening gig after release at Glimmer Lunet's larger Glitz & Glamour tour put her first album on the map, and from there she was headlining her own shows. No one is asking who she is, they’re asking why she hasn’t dropped her third album yet, because her yearly schedule just hit and we don’t have a name or lead single. She doesn’t need a publicity stunt when fans are already begging her for more music. Everyone assumes such a blatant spectacle on TV is planned, and so instead suspicion turns towards CATRA as the beneficiary, but when you know her history, that too seems misplaced. CATRA is a new face to pop culture, but Catra isn’t to the industry. Her debut album came out five months ago with the lead single almost a year old, but faces that fresh don’t make it to the VMAs. A long story led to the display that we saw last night.

Catra started in the music industry in a much humbler way than Adora: she sent a hundred emails, and she sold one song. Then she sold two. After a half-dozen songs got picked up by artists spanning from Sony to Universal Music Group, she moved to L.A. She didn’t see much success at first. She only sold songs occasionally like she had from back home in Eternia, where the cost of living was half as much per year, but soon she started to appear at local shows with a band she had been putting together with an old friend.

The Horde isn’t a meteoric success story. None of the original five members had any connections in the industry. Catra managed to pick up a tenacious agent for her songs, but she was struggling even to sell her lyrics. Signing a band takes more. Catra has been quite blatant about how she got them noticed: She sold out. She drove hard into ghostwriting pop music until she endeared herself to someone willing to pass The Horde’s demo to an agent, who was in the right mood to open the sound file, and was willing to take a risk on it after hearing the anguish in the song.

The Horde’s debut album, White Out, did well for a new band in the emo rock space a few years after the genre’s boom passed. Their time spent building a fanbase before they got signed paid off and they managed to open for a mid-size tour to promote their debut album. They knew they could always lose momentum without heavy promotion from their label, so they played it smart and put together an EP to keep their fans engaged as they worked on their second studio album. That’s when lightning struck for Catra: one of the old agents who bought her pop demos came back, but they didn’t just want lyrics this time.

“They said my demo version came out better than any other artists' that they tried selling it to. I told them I wanted to make music with more punch behind it and they challenged me to bring that depth to pop. I was surprised by how much I liked the challenge instead of leaning into genre conventions like I learned to do when ghostwriting.”

-CATRA for Out Magazine

Some fans considered her a sellout when she debuted eponymously, but she made it clear she did that once to get The Horde signed and she didn’t do it with her solo career: instead, she got full control, and not just of her music. The Horde operates in a genre famous for caring about those sellout accusations CATRA went through, so they kept their sound and subject matter tight. For CATRA, it kept her locked in the bad headspace she wrote the first album in. She couldn't emotionally recover when she was reliving it every time she was on a stage. When given her own career, CATRA thrived on the blank slate of getting full control as a soloist.

Everyone in the industry already knew Catra could write a pop hit, she’d done it before. What she needed to prove was that she could write a CATRA hit, and she did. “good 4 u” was the second song released off of her debut album, Radio Confessional, and it performed well pre-release, but after the album came out, those lucky stars lined up again and it skyrocketed in the charts, reaching the Billboard Hot 100.

That’s when the VMAs reached out about a performance. They already knew she would end up nominated somewhere on the stage, and though she had only done a few live performances as a soloist, she was known to be a legendary performer dating back to her days in The Horde. The VMA performance shows exactly why: she knows how to work with a minimal staging budget because all eyes focus on her. She has a captivating stage presence and a talent for pouring emotion into her voice without effecting her pitch at all. CATRA once said she is at her best when she’s pissed and holding a mic — the whole country has seen why, now.

While the exact process behind how a performance for the VMAs is put together is a secret, the performances are practiced, including CATRA’s. There has been no official word from the VMAs about the original plans for the night, but inside sources confirmed by CL Insite shared how these practice performances went, and it has big implications for the night of the show.

CATRA has yet to headline a tour and her run through the audience was planned as a way to highlight her ability to engage a crowd. She had a route and wide marks where she was supposed to stop to sing to someone, but they couldn’t know which seats would be having the best time, so she practiced stopping at various points to make sure she could still keep time and reach the stage for the final lines without losing the camera. This was the biggest focus of the practice that our sources witnessed, and you can see this in the final performance. CATRA found people dancing in their seats that immediately matched her energy when she approached them.

It’s possible only a select few executives knew the direction CATRA was going to take the final performance and they planned it in secret with CATRA’s team for the views. In Hollywood, any conspiracy is possible, but if the evidence points towards CATRA approaching Adora on her own, does that mean it still has to be a publicity stunt?

CATRA’s reputation as a performer didn’t come from nowhere. Her fans refer to some of her shows as “Manic Mode” days — days when CATRA performs like she’s singing to ghosts and keeps a reserve in the tour budget specifically for property damage when she kicks something over at the height of a song and keeps performing even as it breaks. If the narrative CATRA has presented in her music is true — if she even feels like it could be — what would you do if you saw the love of your life, who left you when you were at your mental lowest to sell out for fame, competing for the same artistic honor as you on the biggest night of your career thus far, while you’re two minutes and twenty-four seconds into reliving the memory of that betrayal as you become lightheaded from releasing all your oxygen to hit the high notes?

Would you feel manic?

While Adora’s team is presumed to be preparing a statement, CATRA is instead preparing for her first tour. Adora has spent the last three years telling the public about the one who got away from her the way that she wanted to. CATRA hasn’t taken control of the narrative, but she has taken it from Adora and given it to the public. It’s up to them now to decide whose breakup songs are the real version of events.