What’s always made RØRY special is how vividly she lays her heart on the table. Somehow, BLOODLETTING is even more devastating than her 2025 debut RESTORATION, particularly with the inescapable presence of grief across the record. Although she lost her mum to cancer almost 20 years ago, time has hardly diminished its pain. The heart-wrenching SWALLOW makes this clear as she glances over the abyss and ponders joining her in death – ‘I just wanna go,’ she pleads. Later, a cure for cancer imagines the bittersweetness of knowing any scientific breakthrough can never bring back ‘The sound of your voice / Or the years I lost without you’, backed by a synth that echoes the beep of a hospital monitor.
While RØRY is already adept at expelling her pain, she never wallows. It ends with a makeup-wrecking outro, [do you want to live?], in which people share why they wanted to die and what made them choose to live, as a weighty reminder of what grieving, healing and confronting oneself is all for. Though different emotions are taking centre stage here, RØRY has been real, raw and affecting all over again, and it’s impossible to experience BLOODLETTING without feeling even just a prickle of everything she’s endured over the years.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Hot Milk, MOTHICA, PRESIDENT
BLOODLETTING is out on September 11 via SADCORE Records.