Tickets are now available for RØRY at Rock City!
In January 2025, RØRY got everything she had spent her life fighting for.
Her debut album RESTORATION entered the UK Top 10. Years of hard work, therapy and relentless self-belief had culminated in a second chance at the music career she once thought she had missed. She had built a devoted community around her music, sold out headline tours, won Heavy Music Awards Breakthrough UK Artist, and become one of the most compelling success stories in modern British rock. She was in love. She had a family. She had purpose.
From the outside, it looked like the happy ending.
Then something unexpected happened.
“I was more depressed than I’d ever been,” she says. “I’d spent so much of my life believing that if I could just get here, if I could just achieve these things in music, then I’d finally be okay. But life doesn’t work like that. The darkness was still there. In some ways, it was louder than ever.”
That contradiction became the foundation of BLOODLETTING, RØRY’s second album and the remarkable follow-up to RESTORATION. Where its predecessor chronicled survival, redemption and rebuilding a life from the ashes, BLOODLETTING asks a far more difficult question:
What happens when you get everything you thought you wanted?
What happens when the dreams come true but the grief remains? When the wounds heal but the anger stays buried beneath them? When mortality, loss and heartbreak continue to exist regardless of how much progress you have made?
For much of her life, RØRY had been comfortable writing about sadness. Anger was another matter entirely.
As therapy forced her to confront decades of suppressed emotions, she found herself face to face with feelings she had spent a lifetime avoiding: rage, resentment, jealousy, revenge, even hatred. Emotions that felt dangerous. Emotions that had never appeared in her songwriting before.
“I realised I was sick from being nice,” she says. “I’d spent so much of my life being the bigger person, forgiving people, understanding people, making excuses for people. I’d become disconnected from huge parts of myself. BLOODLETTING was about reclaiming them.”
The title itself became the perfect metaphor. Historically, bloodletting was an ancient medical practice where blood was released from the body to cure illness. For RØRY, it became a spiritual act. A release of everything buried too deep for too long.
The result is the heaviest, most ambitious and most expansive music of her career. Working once again with long-time collaborators Kingdoms alongside additional production and mixing from Dan Lancaster (Bring Me The Horizon, Muse), RØRY pushed herself further than ever before. Inspired by the emotional weight of modern heavy music and determined to evolve as an artist, she began taking vocal lessons and learned to scream for the first time, discovering a new language capable of expressing emotions clean vocals could never fully contain.
Songs like DEGRADATION and MORTAL a fury unlike anything heard on RESTORATION, while tracks such as GREY, SWALLOW and STRANGE explore family wounds, depression and existential uncertainty with devastating honesty. Elsewhere a cure for cancer wrestles directly with life, death and the impossible reality of loving people we cannot save.
The album took on an even deeper significance following the death of guitarist and collaborator Miles Kent. Initially brought in to help shape the heavier direction of the record, Kent’s talent, humour and courage left a profound impression on everyone involved. As his health deteriorated, conversations about riffs and songwriting gradually became conversations about hospitals, treatment and survival.
In his final communication with RØRY, he promised he would fight until his dying breath.
The following day, he was gone.
His death reverberates throughout BLOODLETTING. Not as tragedy alone, but as a confrontation with mortality itself. Faced with the loss of someone desperately fighting for more time, RØRY found herself questioning what it truly means to be alive.
“If we’re all going to die,” she says, “what are we going to do while we’re here?”
That question echoes through every corner of the record.
Religious imagery appears throughout its lyrics and visuals: crosses, churches, sacrament, Eucharist, blood. Yet BLOODLETTING is not interested in easy answers. Instead, it inhabits the space between faith and humanity, asking whether a meaningful life is found not through perfection, but through embracing the full spectrum of human experience.
Love.
Grief.
Sex.
Rage.
Joy.
Loss.
Hope.
Despair.
All of it.
The album’s striking artwork reflects that philosophy. Naked and pierced by two blood-red daggers, RØRY presents herself entirely exposed. The two daggers nod of course to album two, but also each represents the central questions at the heart of the record: Do you want to die? Or do do you want to live?
It is a question posed from the opening moments of Welcome to the Bloodletting, which invites listeners into a dark and uncomfortable journey, warning that confronting the truth may come at a cost. Those “whose peace was bought with your silence” may not welcome what follows.
Yet by the album’s conclusion, the answer begins to emerge.
Following the emotional climax of STRANGE, RØRY invited members of her fan community, The 37 Club, to send voice notes explaining why they once wanted to die—and why they ultimately chose to live. Hundreds responded. Their voices form the closing moments of Do You Want To Live?, transforming what began as one person’s story into something collective, hopeful and profoundly human.
For an artist whose career has always been built on connection, there could be no more fitting ending.
The success of RESTORATION established RØRY as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary rock. BLOODLETTING confirms something even more significant: she is still growing. Still evolving. Still pushing herself into uncomfortable territory. Still refusing to be defined by the expectations placed upon her.
With BLOODLETTING, RØRY has created her most fearless work yet. It begins with her asking listeners if they’re willing to walk into the darkness. It ends with real people choosing life.
For all its rage, grief and sadness, BLOODLETTING ultimately exists for one reason: to remind people that life is worth staying for.
For more events, check out what’s on here.