RØRY Bloodletting Review: A Therapy Session in Steel-Toe Boots

RØRY Bloodletting delivers an unfiltered emotional journey through alternative metal and pop-rock, embracing raw grief, anger, and survival with honesty and intensity.

A quick warning before the first beat

I put on RØRY Bloodletting thinking I was getting another polished catharsis record—big feelings, big hooks, tidy survival story. Nope. This album shows up like a countdown to impact and then acts surprised you flinch.

What’s really happening here is simple: RØRY isn’t trying to sound brave. She’s documenting what it feels like when bravery is the only available setting left—and when that still doesn’t stop the panic from leaking through.

This album starts like a door slamming—on purpose

The opener “[welcome to bloodletting]” doesn’t ease you in. It rolls out a psychedelic, cyber-horror kind of soundscape—like an indoor rollercoaster built inside a haunted server room. And then she drops the question that keeps coming back like a nervous tic: “do you want to live or do you want to die?”

That question isn’t poetic. It’s practical. The whole record treats it like a yes/no prompt that keeps glitching, because the answer changes depending on the hour.

And yeah, part of me thinks the album wants you to have “fun” with it—the headbanging, the shout-along release—but it’s the kind of fun where you realize you’ve been clenching your jaw for four minutes straight.

The early singles don’t just set the tone—they set the trap

By the time “DEGRADATION” and “SWALLOW” have already done their damage, the album’s emotional floorboards are basically loose. If you’re still standing there acting fine, “a cure for cancer” arrives like a quiet, merciless correction.

The lowercase title is a fake-out. The song itself is heavy in the way real-life heaviness is: not dramatic, not cinematic—just weight that doesn’t move.

This track carries grief tied to RØRY losing her mum, and it also sits next to the shadow of guitarist Miles Kent, who was brought in as part of the push toward a heavier album. His absence isn’t a footnote here; it’s woven into the record’s nerves. And it’s not just sadness either—there’s humor in the way grief sometimes comes with a weird little smirk when you remember how someone used to talk.

“And when I sent the demos, which have the lyric, ‘the dying wish of a cancer patient’, he was like, ‘You taking the piss, mate?’ … ‘Sorry, it might be Dead Boy Walking’.” — RØRY

That kind of joke doesn’t lessen the loss. It proves the loss was real.

The record’s secret weapon: her scream isn’t “good,” it’s honest

“MORTAL” opens with a lyric that feels like a final message turned into a mission statement: “you can fight until your dying breath.” And the way she delivers it—raspy, newly sharpened—makes it clear the screaming on RØRY Bloodletting isn’t about technique first. It’s about permission.

I kept waiting for her to “level up” into the clean, athletic metalcore scream that sounds expensive. She doesn’t, not really. And honestly? That’s why it works. There’s something soul-scratching about a scream that sounds like it came from a place you don’t want to visit twice.

Then comes “[the death of a people pleaser]”, which is basically the album’s breakpoint—the moment the polite mask doesn’t just crack, it explodes. When she screeches “I am the nicest person alive”, it lands like satire and confession at the same time. A reasonable person could say it’s melodramatic. I’d argue the melodrama is the point: people-pleasing always looks a little ridiculous once you finally say it out loud.

The punk-ish left turn is a grim joke, and it’s supposed to be

“KIDS THESE DAYS” swerves into something almost punk—garish, tongue-in-cheek, and deliberately obnoxious in the verses. It points outward at the state of things, but it also takes aim at judgmental voices from her own generation. The song feels like scrolling doomfully, slamming the phone down, and then laughing because the alternative is screaming into a pillow.

If I’m being picky: this is one of the spots where the album flirts with being a bit too pleased with its own bite. Not enough to ruin it, but enough that I caught myself thinking, okay, I get it—keep going.

“DEAD GIRL WALKING” is the defibrillator moment

Then “DEAD GIRL WALKING” shows up and flips the polarity. It’s the resuscitation scene, the sudden pivot where the compass swings toward optimism, and she hits that line—“all I know is I’m alive”—like she’s testing the words to see if they’re still true.

The clean-to-scream weaving is tight here, and it’s not just for drama. It’s the record demonstrating its whole philosophy: rage can be daily, even playful; despair can be routine; survival can be a chorus you repeat until it sticks.

“GREY” doesn’t ask for sympathy—it asks a harder question

“GREY” hits like a gut punch precisely because it doesn’t dress itself up. That opening thought—“why am I still here?”—hangs there, uncomfortable and plain. It’s not a diary entry. It’s a recurring popup ad in the brain.

The production (from Dan Lancaster, credited here with work alongside Bring Me the Horizon and Muse) helps turn that doubt into something physical: sharp edges, piercing sorrow, a kind of high-definition ache. If this album has any “radio” problem, it’s not that the hooks aren’t there—it’s that the emotional content refuses to behave like background noise.

“hometown” is where the album stops performing and just… sits down

After earlier devastation, “hometown” comes in like an acoustic oasis. It’s still bitter, but quieter—like the sadness finally got tired of yelling.

She paints a return home without her mother and with an unreachable father, and the line “I know I’ve got nothing here, but it’s still my hometown” is delivered with this mix of resignation and loyalty that’s honestly hard to listen to if you’ve ever outgrown a place before it stopped having power over you.

This is where my first impression changed. On my initial pass, I thought the album’s heavier direction might bulldoze the softer emotional detail. But “hometown” proved the opposite: the heaviness is there to protect the tenderness, not replace it.

And the vocal performance here—soft but still soaring—does a sneaky thing. It turns anger into something usable without pretending anger is glamorous.

“STRANGE” almost ends the album perfectly… almost

“STRANGE” feels like it should be the closer. It has the vivacity of a pop ballad, but with that alt-metal crunch that keeps it from turning into pure sentimentality. And the line “oh how strange it is to want to live” lands like the album’s thesis finally said plainly.

That lyric doesn’t sound like triumph. It sounds like surprise. Like she’s catching herself wanting something and not trusting it yet.

I’m not totally sure everyone will love that tone—some listeners want their survival songs to sound victorious, not suspicious. But I think the suspicion is the honest part.

The spoken-word finale is sweet enough to risk being too sweet

Instead of ending on “STRANGE,” RØRY Bloodletting closes with a fourth spoken word track, “[do you want to live?]”, featuring recordings from fans in the 37 Club.

It’s heartfelt community-building—and it matters, because this whole album is clearly tied to the idea that her audience isn’t just an audience. It’s a support structure she’s actively bolting together in public.

Does it get a little sugary? Yeah. It veers close to that “group hug in a fondue factory” vibe, where you can almost taste the sweetness in the air. But I can’t argue with its placement. This record spends so long staring down the void that it earns the right to end with voices answering back.

So what’s the point of Bloodletting?

If you want the blunt version: RØRY Bloodletting is a record that takes pop instincts—hooks, pacing, memorability—and uses them as delivery systems for things people normally whisper. It ramps up the intensity compared to RESTORATION (which I remember landing as a hopeful counterweight to destructive sadness), and it’s pretty obvious she chose “heavier” not as a genre flex but as a coping mechanism.

I’d personally peg it around a 9/10 experience in terms of effectiveness at what it’s trying to do—though “effective” here includes “emotionally inconvenient.”

BLOODLETTING is out now via SADCØRE Records.
For more information on RØRY, she points people to her official page on Facebook.

Conclusion

RØRY Bloodletting doesn’t try to heal you gently. It pressures you into honesty—sometimes with a scream, sometimes with a pop chorus, sometimes with a quiet acoustic line that hits worse than any breakdown.

Our verdict: People who like their alternative metal with real emotional consequences will latch onto this album fast—especially if you’ve ever used loud music as a functioning adult coping strategy. If you want clean escapism, background vibes, or lyrics that keep a polite distance, this will feel like someone reading your private notes out loud and asking you to harmonize.

FAQ

• What is the core theme running through RØRY Bloodletting?
  The album keeps circling one blunt question—whether you actually want to live—and it treats the answer as something that changes, not something you solve once.
• Is Bloodletting heavier than RESTORATION?
  Yes. The guitars and screams push harder, and the emotional delivery feels less “uplift after sadness” and more “sadness and uplift wrestling in the same room.”
• Which track feels like the emotional center?
  “a cure for cancer” carries a specific, crushing weight, while “hometown” is the quiet moment that makes the rest feel real instead of theatrical.
• Does the album lean more pop-rock or alt metal overall?
  It plays both sides: pop structure and memorability with alt-metal texture and bite. The hooks are there; they’re just wrapped around sharp edges.
• What’s with the spoken-word tracks and fan recordings?
  They frame the album like a guided experience—warning you, confronting you, then letting the community answer back at the end through the 37 Club recordings.

If this record’s visuals are lodged in your brain, you can always pick up a favorite album cover poster from our store—tastefully loud, zero screaming required: https://www.architeg-prints.com