It’s starting to feel as if any artist discovered through social media is readily accused of being fake in some way, shape, or form. RØRY has been accused of being an industry plant, even of faking an ADHD diagnosis for her 'brand'. All she has to say on the matter? “Bro, if only I was that smart.”
It’s easy to see how a few people have bought into the misconception – she’s been crowned Best UK Breakthrough Artist by the Heavy Music Awards, amassed over 30 million streams and sold out UK tours - all catnip for cynics. But her struggle and fight for her newfound success hasn’t come overnight. “I’ve been doing music for 20 years," she explains. "I worked and failed for so long."
RØRY - real name Roxanne Emery - started writing songs before she knew what writing a song even involved. Growing up in a working class environment, she says, meant that creativity “wasn’t on the table.”
“[My parents] had come from very poor upbringings," she tells us. "They both had grown up in council estates and worked incredibly hard and they really wanted me to go into a 'stable' job.” And to them, music was anything but.
However, RØRY stuck with her creativity, playing guitar and piano as a kid, even despite her parents’ desperation for her to have a life they never had - going to university, having a white-collar job. And, to be fair, she did at first: at 23, she was working in a bank because she had “followed the path they wanted for me.”
A year beforehand, however, RØRY's mother passed away. Despite her uncertainty about RØRY's deepening connection to music, the experience only solidified it. “My family was really oppressed emotionally," RØRY says, "so we didn’t ever talk about my mom’s cancer or her death. And I’m a really, really fucking sensitive person.
“I didn’t know how to cope, I kept it all down, because there was no outlet. And I wrote my first adult song, I guess, about my mum dying.” The song ended up being Late, and despite RØRY insisting that she didn’t know what she was doing, her flatmate at the time overheard her playing it and encouraged her to go to an open mic night.
RØRY did several of those before being signed to a record label and writing her debut album. Devastatingly, the label “went bust” and the record never saw the light of day. “I spent loads of money that my mum had left me – about twenty thousand pounds – and I spent it on this first album and it flopped," she bemoans. "It was heartbreaking for so many reasons.
“I felt like a bad person. My mum had worked her whole life and managed to save twenty thousand pounds and I spent it on Facebook ads on a shitty album that nobody ever got to listen to.”
That feeling manifested into “self destructive behaviours. Drinking, breaking the law, sex, self-harm, whatever – you then get labelled crazy, or troubled.” But her therapist reframed her experiences: it was a normal reaction to a tumultuous childhood and adolescence. “My life was a normal reaction to the childhood I had," she says now. "And now that I have a different life, I have a different reaction.”
For over a decade, RØRY continued those toxic patterns. Then, at 34, after battling alcohol and drug addictions, self-harm and suicide attempts, she got sober. And now, at 40, RØRY’s life has blossomed into something beautiful, poetic and incredibly human. “It’s the pain that has been healing," she says. "To feel those emotions that I’ve swallowed down.”
Her work is cathartic – both for her, and her fans. The ability to be able to open up and become a mirror to someone else’s pain is a skill RØRY now excels at. She understands, because she’s been through it. And she’s willing to shine a light on it: “I didn’t know what the album was going to sound like. I was with some really trusted friends and it was like, ‘Here’s the emotion of the song I want to tell today.’ And with the songs, I had the stories, and then we crafted each sound around that story.”
Through anthemic recent singles such as Blossom and Sorry I'm Late, RØRY channels soaring post-hardcore, shimmering pop and glittering electronica, her songs echoing the work of similarly genre-hopping, emotionally powerful bands like Pvris and Chvrches. It's provided her with more of that much-needed catharsis, but what she deems most valuable in her journey is the community that she has built along the way
“For me, writing songs about such fucking heavy, depressing things is what has allowed me to meet the people who have been through the same things as me, and had similar struggles.”
RØRY's debut album Restoration is out January 31
