Evangelia closes the Paréa Tour at XOYO, the only London date on a run that has taken her Greek-American pop through North America and Athens.
Evangelia Psarakis was born in Bridgewater, New Jersey in 1992 and raised between there and Crete, in a Greek-American community her father helped run. She started releasing music in 2020, with ‘Páme Páme’, and the singles since, ‘Fotiá’, ‘Páli’, ‘Alitheia?!’ and ‘Vradia’, the last of which went to number one in Greece and became her first diamond record, have done something that sounds simple and is not: put contemporary pop and traditional Greek material in the same song without either one reading as decoration on the other. She sings in both languages and treats neither as a costume.
Paréa is the Greek word for the company you keep — the group of friends you are with, and the fact of being with them. The tour is named for it and built around it. Each stop books a local artist alongside her rather than a touring support; in London that is Stolar. The idea is that the audience is part of the paréa rather than in front of it.
The XOYO date is the run’s only British stop and its last, after Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Washington, an Athens night in October, then San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix. Seven until ten on Cowper Street. A room of that size for a singer at this point in a career is the sort of thing people mention afterwards.