RØRY used to feel like she was faking it being onstage. Now, having battled drink and drug abuse, they’re a certified headliner with an eye on the charts. Meet British alt. music’s most surprising success…
Make no mistake about it, RØRY is fucking cool. These days the singer-songwriter may have traded a nightly barrage of Bacardi and Diet Cokes for 9:30pm bedtimes with a “little lavender scented pillow”, but everything about their authentic attitude screams ‘rock star’. And an important one, at that. Even if she doesn’t really see it…
“Isn’t it funny how we judge in our own head?” the musician – whose pronouns are she/they – begins with a laugh. “Rock music feels like such a ‘cool’ place to be. And I always felt like I’m not quite cool enough for it. To me, cool is all mysterious and edgy…”
RØRY is quite literally the polar opposite of those clichéd rock’n’roll adjectives. And it couldn’t be more refreshing. Along with her partner Rich, by day they share wholesome personal videos about everyday life and experiences with mental health to millions online as ADHD Love (the couple are also best-selling authors and creators of a body doubling app called dubbii). By night, RØRY has spent the past few years baring her soul onstage, performing dark alt. songs about addiction, abuse, suicide, grief.
If you’re worried about having to do a Sleep Token-style Reddit deep dive to understand the lore – or should that be løre? – then you can breathe a sigh of relief. When RØRY speaks, what you’re met with is a relatable open book. It’s what makes them so completely brilliant.
Being a “bit weird and wonky” is how they describe this certifiably un-enigmatic dual life, with these somewhat contradictory full-time jobs feeding into and helping one another in unexpected ways.
“I wanted people think I was cool and I was worth something in music – and then you go viral for forgetting to put a tampon in, and suddenly it’s like, ‘Right, shit, I cannot be cool anymore! That’s gone!’” she laughs. “But isn’t that cooler? I don’t have that embarrassment now. I’m wearing more crazy outfits, I’m putting these hair extensions in and wearing this crazy ponytail because I haven’t got the shame. You can’t be ashamed when you’re posting about all these things that most people keep private. It’s been this wonderful exercise in shame reduction, and that becomes the secret weapon of music, really.”
To call getting here ‘a slog’ would be a colossal understatement, though. We’re catching up with RØRY at home amidst a hectic morning of doing a “massive update” on dubbii to hear an inspiring story of unwavering perseverance and an innate love for music like no other. Today, the 40-year-old has big milestones on the horizon: the impending announcement of their debut album, and co-headlining Misery Loves Company’s Bristol gig this weekend. But for the majority of her career, she believed her identity was that of a failure.
Moreover, RØRY had been navigating this emotionally demanding quest for success single-handedly, lacking a “close family” support network due to the fact that her mum passed away when she was younger, and she has no relationship with her dad. Combine that with addiction, and the endless struggles of getting any musical endeavours off the ground, and RØRY’s as surprised as she is grateful that, at long last, shit is finally happening.
“I’d had 20 different jobs, I had four or five different music projects, and every single one failed or fell apart,” they admit. “But I learned so much through fucking up. I learned so much through failure. I made terrible decisions, I made some terrible music. I’ve had so many projects flop or fall apart, and sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s someone else. Within each one of those failures is an amazing lesson. But it did almost take me out.”
In 2024, such disappointments are a thing of the distant past. Not only that, but RØRY’s essentially experiencing the very opposite now. It’s pretty wild.
“Every day, things grow and work,” they beam. “I’m like, ‘Whoa! What is this side of life, where things go well?’ I’ve never been here before!’ I love the ADHD stuff, and it’s taught me so much. It feels like we’re doing something good. But music is, and always has been, the deepest passion I’ve ever had. I wrote a song after my mum died – that’s how my music career started. And all throughout the years, when I struggled with drinking and drugs, I never, ever stopped. I was pissed in a basement flat, writing on a little piano, and then when I got sober, I came back to it.
“Through every iteration of my life, and all the craziness, music has always been there,” they add. “Now it’s blossoming, and it’s working, and I want to treat that with the utmost respect, because not everyone gets a second chance in music.”
The moment RØRY truly felt they arrived as a fully-fledged artist was this past May, at Slam Dunk. The rock and pop-punk weekender marked her first ever festival appearance, less than two years after they made their debut headlining turn at the Camden Assembly. It was standing on the Kerrang! Stage in Hatfield, they grin, where it all became “real”.
“When I began, it was like, ‘I’m faking it. I’m pushing beyond my comfort zone,’” RØRY explains. “It was disjointed, and it didn’t feel like me. And then I did the first show, and then the first tour, and that sells out, and you practice at that, and then the second tour. At Slam Dunk, I’m thinking that nobody’s going to be there. I’m like, ‘I’m going to give it my all, even if only three people are there!’ But I was very lucky, and it was packed-out. I felt like, ‘This is me. I’m doing it.’ That’s what this year has been – sort of like an embodiment of it, rather than reaching for it.”
Just as RØRY has spectacularly grown an audience hungry to experience shared catharsis with them live – from that first show in North London to selling out the 1,500-capacity Electric Ballroom down the road – she has simultaneously developed within. Case in point is June’s triumphant rock banger Blossom: a dazzling first look at her debut album, not to mention a drastic lyrical change from everything that’s come before (‘You thought that I was gonna choke / But I’m still here’).
“I got mad goosebumps when I wrote it and recorded it,” RØRY smiles proudly. “And when I sing it live, I feel really powerful. So much of my historical work was very sad and very introspective, whereas this one feels like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been through shit, but I’m powerful because of it.’”
The record, they tease, is also “very much in that vein: from a deeper, more powerful place”.
“I’d love people to connect with it,” she continues, “to love it, be surprised by it, to be hurt by it, to be healed by it. It’s painful, but it’s hopeful. I’m just excited for people to hear it – and hopefully for it to do well enough that I will make another one!”
Happily listening back to the masters the other day, RØRY was struck with a sense of creative peace that’s never really existed before.
“There’s a lot less self-doubt,” they say. “It’s really nice to feel proud of this thing, whatever it does. I’m still very much an ‘every review will be terrible’ person. But how cool is it to go, ‘They’ll say it’s rubbish, they’ll say I’m fake, they’ll say I can’t sing,’ but I’ll still love it? It’s the first time I’ve experienced that. I’m normally very, very horrible about the things I make. [But this switch is] 100 per cent down to seeing people singing in the front row, or wearing one of my T-shirts. You realise there are people there who really like it.”
So too is RØRY embracing the fact that this is all going on at what the music industry might have you believe is an unconventional – or even the ‘wrong’ – time in her life. That in itself, though, is a cause for celebration.
“I used to really want to lie about my age, and I’ve watched it become the coolest, biggest part of my story,” they enthuse. “When we release the album, they’re running with the fact that I’m 40 in the press release (laughs). It’s like, ‘Cool, the thing that I hate the most might just be the thing that the world needs to hear!’”
It’s something fans all across the country might get to collectively revel in at some point, as well. A believer in actualising “outrageously ridiculous goals”, RØRY’s already set her sights on landing the record in the Top 40. Even if it means she’s got to convince Rich to drive them up and down the UK, physically handing out vinyl from the car boot. Seriously.
“I love doing what you can’t do and what you’re told is impossible,” she says. “What I’ve been told is impossible is it going Top 40. It would need to sell 4,000, and people are like, ‘There’s no way. You can’t do it independent.’ I get that it’s highly unlikely, but I’m gonna try. I know that I can meet 4,000 people. So I’m currently in that: just the absolute delusion of a crazy goal! But what I’ve learned in the last few years is that it’s the people crazy enough to believe in delusion that can sometimes make it become reality.”
In the more immediate (and less petrol-draining) future, RØRY’s got the task of playing Misery Loves Company. And, after crossing paths with co-headliners The Hunna many years ago in her former life, she can’t believe she’s now sharing the same billing with them.
“We got on really well and wrote this wicked song,” they recall. “And I remember feeling super inspired, but maybe also a bit sad – sort of like, ‘Oh man, they’re doing it.’ It was great to be helping and songwriting, but it was also slightly bittersweet. There was 100 per cent a bit of jealousy in there. So now it’s a full-circle moment – we’re going to be playing the same stage and co-headlining. It’s just amazing! I get to fill my cup with all these little firsts. Again, that helps you to feel real, and that you can do it.”
Asked about longer-term goals following a genuinely monumental 2024, and RØRY – as always – speaks from the heart.
“Artistic connection with an audience is like oxygen,” they smile. “When I first had people go, ‘When’s this song out?’ or, ‘I love this song!’ it was like, ‘Whoa! That’s the missing puzzle piece.’ I’d love to still be releasing music at 50. I only just got used to doing it at 30, and now I’m going to have to do it at 40!”
Things have had a funny old way of working themselves out. It’s how RØRY emphatically made it all happen for themselves, though, that’s to be truly in awe of.
“Life can do a 180 on you at any moment, and my one decision was walking into a recovery meeting,” they say. “One decision: one walk through one door, and your whole life changes…
“That’s wildly cool!”
RØRY co-headlines Misery Loves Company with The Hunna this month, and plays a charity show at London’s 100 Club in support of War Child on October 8. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.
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