Story by Luna Bacce
Medusa had her reasons. Riah has the soundtrack. The Denver artist’s debut full-length album, Insurrection, turns rage, desire, and survival into ten tracks of dark pop. Its world extends into Medusa’s Curse, a full-scale DejaView Productions show at Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom, where the music takes physical form through fire dancers, aerialists, live snakes, and immersive staging.
Written and produced by Riah with Mitchell “Merch” Cohen at Dreamspace Studios, Insurrection moves between dark, industrial, and alternative pop with a sensual, confrontational edge. Beneath that sound are questions about what we owe each other, who gets to demand devotion, and whose anger we’re willing to hear. Debt, appetite, accountability, and power run through the record, connecting private wounds to the systems that keep reopening them.
Riah developed the album and stage production together, allowing Medusa’s story to slip into her own.
“The songs stopped being about me and started being about Medusa, and somewhere in there I stopped being able to tell the difference,” she says.
Every song scores a portion of Medusa’s Curse, which Riah co-produced with Luna Cash of DejaView Productions. Music and movement grew alongside each other from the beginning, shaping a show where the body carries as much of the story as the lyrics. Fire, aerial performance, and live snakes give the album’s tension a physical presence.
At the center is Medusa: feared, punished, and remembered as a monster. Riah looks closer at what she endured and who got to tell her story. Through that lens, the myth becomes a way to explore how women’s pain is dismissed, how their anger becomes evidence against them, and what happens when they claim the power to speak for themselves.
“Medusa’s story is 3,000 years old, and it’s the same story women are still telling,” Riah says. “That’s not a coincidence; that’s a pattern. ‘Insurrection’ is what it sounds like when you finally name the pattern.”
For Riah, that pattern has personal stakes. She entered the Los Angeles entertainment industry at 17, encountering its darker realities in the years before Me Too. Eventually, she stepped away. Returning to music meant taking control of her creative direction—and deciding for herself what she wanted to put onstage.
Her experience as a live performer and competitive pole dancer informs that approach. With division and heels wins at the 2023 PSO Mountain competition, Riah brings an understanding of movement, tension, and physical storytelling to a production that asks its performers to embody the music.
Across Insurrection, desire keeps company with consequence. “Faith” explores the weight of carrying someone else’s pain. “Self Help” takes aim at the treadmill of earning, spending, and wanting more. “Lestat” gives dangerous attraction a vampiric setting, while “Apolitical” follows the cost of looking away from violence until it becomes impossible to ignore.
By “Collectors,” the debts are coming due. “Medusa” turns the supposed curse into a source of strength, reclaiming the very thing that made her feared. A cover of Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” joins the narrative, bringing its charged sense of intimacy and unease into Riah’s world.
Together, Insurrection and Medusa’s Curse give Riah room to confront these questions through sound, spectacle, and the body. Medusa gets to be furious. She gets to want. And this time, she gets the final word.
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