RØRY: Don’t Keep Calm, Scream On

RØRY, the alternative musician and icon, ADHD love co-star, Best UK Breakthrough Artist at the 2024 Heavy Music Awards, achiever of a Top Ten UK Charts album, and owner of 30+ domain names, joins today’s call mid-doomscroll. Unaware that they’ve been released from the Zoom waiting room, continues doom-scrolling with her red-tipped, metal-ringed, pointed nails until a distorted sound (cough/laugh) breaks through. There’s more laughter, a quick discussion about a new business idea inspired by her manicure, “Pierce the Nail”, followed by the admission that she has a new obsession. “I started playing golf three months ago, and now it’s my entire personality. See, you’ve been on the call with me for four minutes, and I’ve already mentioned it.” 

Taking up golf isn’t as random as you, or indeed RØRY herself, might imagine. “I think it’s a really good way to take out anger,” she explains. “Just imagine it’s somebody’s face and…thwack.” In RØRY’s debut album, RESTORATION, they wrote and sang (and rapped) through grief and addiction, but the focal point was the hopeful ending: the restoration of a music career, mental health, sobriety, and even old friendships. So how did this overwhelmingly positive turn lead to BLOODLETTING as the follow-up album a year later, an album rooted in something that doesn’t usually sit in the same Venn diagram as hope: anger. 

“There’s this line in DEGRADATION [the album’s first single] that says, ‘terminal anger’. That’s what I felt like I had, like I was dying of anger. I hate the term people pleaser because I didn’t please literally anyone, but if you’re a self-identified ‘nicest person alive’, you have a raging river of resentment that you’re in denial about. And I’m no longer in denial. So I was like, ‘let it flow’. And when you turn on the tap after having it closed for so long, that’s when you get BLOODLETTING, the album. Sorry, I’m a prick. Speaking in metaphor,” she laughs. 

It turns out the reason behind their self-identification as “the nicest person alive” goes all the way back to RØRY, Roxanne Emery’s, childhood. “When I was young, I was quite a confident, fun, naughty kid (a fucking nightmare). Dad was a bit of a fool, and I was angry and expressed that in unhealthy ways. After my mum died I fell into grief, and then being on my own with that grief was a little bit more than I could bear. And I think when I came out of that phase of my life with the addiction, self-harm, self-hatred. I came out with this sense of wanting to clean myself up and be a better, nicer person, and part of that was thinking that a clean and nice person isn’t angry. Which I just took a bit too far. I cleaned myself so much there was nothing left, and actually we need a bit of dirt, don’t we?”

Thanks to the pursuit of a difficult dream and it “kinda” working, being in a really loving relationship, and breakthroughs in therapy, RØRY was able to come to this realisation and bring back parts of herself that she’d left behind. “Below the crippling depression and self-loathing, there was anger and…it’s fun. I guess anger has a negative connotation, but actually confidence and sexuality, for instance, can all pull from that energy. Psychoanalytic therapy is very big on anger, and I can see why now.” But it’s not just anger RØRY has been having fun with. Where RESTORATION saw RØRY try their hand at rapping, BLOODLETTING has been a bit of a screamfest. “I’m having so much fun with it, adding it to places where it probably doesn’t need to be. Like on DEAD GIRL WALKING, I scream, ‘three, two, one!’ We didn’t need to scream that, did we? My clean singing voice is sweet, a bit young, and very soft. So to access this horrendous other part is great.” 

So screaming is great fun, great for channelling the anger, and great for showing a music journalist who said she had an “aggressive delivery that sounds as if it’s coming from an actual kid,” that she can put things right. “Luke Nuttall at The Soundboard reviewed RESTORATION, and he’s known for being quite brutal. He actually said some quite nice things about the album, but he said it on one of the songs that I’d desperately wanted to have a scream on and did try, but I knew it wasn’t very good. It’s one of those journalism things when you’re like, ‘you’ve pissed me off, but you’re so right.’ And I thought, ‘Right, Luke Nuttall, I appreciate the honesty,’ and signed up for vocal lessons. I needed that kick in the arse to go and do it because I was also 40. I’m feeling way better about it now, but I was still carrying a bit of that, ‘oh, I can’t do that. I’m a fucking stepmom.’” The fact that Luke went on to review RØRY’s Main Stage set at Download this year and write that she now has “real chops at screaming and metalcore acumen that complement her huge pop choruses so well,” means a lot.

“I think it’s powered my whole career, all the words of, ‘you can’t do this. We don’t want you. This will never work.’ And the constructive criticisms. In a way, I thrive off negativity. Also, I’m not very good at day-to-day life, like cooking, cleaning and admin. What I could never say to ‘can you do the dishes now?’ is ‘I’m doomscrolling.’ But if I’m like, ‘I’m learning to metal scream for my album,’ if I’m [air quotes] working, then I’m left alone. I just constantly have to find ways to work on my craft so I don’t have to do stuff around the house. Maybe that’s my whole career, just avoiding doing the laundry.”

RØRY may not be learning how to do laundry like a pro, but she has a multitude of side quests (from a resin business to non-gendered swimwear) which, piled onto decades of music industry struggles, have helped with learning something far more valuable. “I know the value of failure. It’s the price that has to be paid to build something successful. I learnt that lesson when I was a songwriter for many years, and I wrote three hit records; people see you as a hit songwriter if you write three hit records. But I’ve written thousands of songs. And nobody knows about the flops. People will literally only judge you from what they see as successful. So keep flopping.”

When someone hears the name RØRY, it’s certainly not the 30 domain names of “unsuccessful” business ideas that come to mind. It’s that they played the main stage at Download Festival this year – the oldest woman in the festival’s history to make her debut there, no less. It’s the huge headline tour they’re embarking on in 2027 with DELILAH BON and MOTHICA around 5000 capacity venues, 20 times the size of what they were playing just four years ago. And yet, despite these mammoth achievements, RØRY has barely scratched the surface of what she believes herself capable of: “I’m excited to hear what this crazy old bitch is gonna do next.”

BLOODLETTING is out now via SADCØRE Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS133 here.

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