Kate Morley@katemorley@hachyderm.io
A couple of weeks ago a friend introduced me to RØRY’s music. It’s been many years since I’ve enjoyed a new singer this much. We’re going to see her on tour in November (27 years after the last time I went to a live show).
Stylistically much of her music is catchy pop-rock, but it stands out due to its brutally honest autobiographical lyrics. (Take this as a content warning.)
Her debut EP, Good Die Young, is close to perfection. It opens with a devastating monologue about obsessing over the chances she missed when she was younger (she was 37 at the time), and continues with songs about her alcoholism, her wish to go back to a simpler time, the loss of her mother to cancer (when she was 22) and a friend to depression, and a desperate plea to “help your friends get sober”. The album pivots after she imagines her own funeral, and she starts to celebrate the “small victories” of her recovery (getting dressed, making her bed, winning against her head), before the defiant conclusion as she tells her younger self “hold on, I know it’s gonna get better, this is a song not a suicide letter”.
Her second EP, Family Drama, takes on a similar structure, including an opening monologue on the nature of family in all its forms. She addresses the trauma her father caused, and in one devastating song imagines an alternative version of herself who had a supportive family. In a cathartic conclusion she imagines “the apology i’ll never receive” from her father (they’re no longer in contact), but forgives him anyway.
Following these EPs, her debut album, RESTORATION, is more forward-looking, and more stylistically varied, from the aggressive opening “if pain could talk, what would it say?” to the powerful “hold on” where she raps with her younger self. Trauma is ever-present, but now combined with a kind of spiritual self-belief in who she can now be: “everything you lost will be restored”.
Just perfection, from start to finish.