Empress Of @ YES, Manchester, 27 Mar

On 27 January, 1984 a pre-Like a Virgin Madonna played The Haçienda as part of special edition of The Tube. She sang a couple of songs and then made way for a temporary Factory supergroup The Factory Allstars, made up of members of the Durutti Column, A Certain Ratio and New Order. Years later, when Tony Wilson reminded Madge that she’d played his club, she said she thought she must’ve wiped it from her memory. But if you were there, guaranteed it ain’t something you’re forgetting.

What’s that got to do with Lorely Rodriguez, the Honduran-American performer better known as Empress Of, you might ask? Watching her play The Pink Room in Manchester's YES is a little like watching that scratchy footage of Madonna from all those years ago. She takes to the stage alongside Erin Fein, of Psychic Twin (whose album Strange Diary is well worth checking out if you like Future Islands by way of The Japanese House), and she is easily as excited as the audience are, flitting back and forth between synths and percussion and the front of the stage where she dances like a teenager in front of her mirror.

Trust Me Baby kicks things off, the opening track from 2018’s Us, her second album, and it very much sets the template for the Empress Of experience: bilingual (she sings in English and Spanish), louche, authentic, calmer than she was on her first album. By the time she hits Everything to Me – 'You’re always going to be everything to me', she sings – and Love for Me, the audience are lapping it up. 'I want to know if you’ve got love for me', the audience roars and Empress Of looks taken aback for a moment. These people fucking love her.

She gets anxious, she tells us. Still isn’t used to talking to crowds. She’s learning as she goes. But the music is talking for her, threading Ariana Grande’s thank u, next into the beginning of Us stand-out When I’m With Him, reworking bangers like Water Water (which gets a rapturous response) from her 2015 debut, Me. 'I’m in the palm of your hand', she sings on I Don’t Even Smoke Weed, but we don’t believe it for a minute. We’re in the palm of her hands.

Yes, she’s got things to learn, her stagecraft will get polished in time, she’ll perfect the banter. It’ll happen for her. And the rest of us get to have seen her in a place about a fifth the size of the once-great Haçienda and we can tell anyone who asks: we saw her way back when, before she got massive.