REVIEW: RØRY – BLOODLETTING
Release date: 11 September 2026
Record label: SADCØRE Records
The Riff Doctor’s Score:
RRRR1/2 — 4.5/5
The Riff Doctor’s Diagnosis
BLOODLETTING turns suppressed grief and anger into RØRY’s heaviest and most ambitious work yet. Its genre-blurring journey is raw without becoming shapeless, devastating without surrendering hope, and held together by an artist prepared to feel everything in order to feel alive again.
The Full Review
What happens after you get everything you thought would save you?
RØRY entered this chapter with a UK Top 10 debut album behind her, alongside sobriety, love, family and a career finally moving at full speed. Yet success does not cauterise old wounds, and healing does not always remove the anger buried beneath them. Her second album, BLOODLETTING, begins precisely there: not with another collapse, but with the uncomfortable discovery that survival alone is not the same as being fully alive.
Produced by long-term collaborators KINGDOMS, with additional production and mixing from Dan Lancaster, the record pushes RØRY further into heavy music while preserving the directness at the centre of her songwriting. Its title borrows from the ancient practice of releasing blood to cure illness, but here it becomes an emotional ritual: the expulsion of grief, resentment, jealousy and rage after a lifetime spent being agreeable, understanding and forgiving.
That concept is laid bare by the narrated [welcome to bloodletting]. RØRY asks whether we want to live or die, before warning that truly choosing life means allowing ourselves to feel everything we have kept trapped inside. That is the price of finally feeling alive. “Welcome to the bloodletting,” she declares, opening the door to a record that refuses forgiveness, forgetting or easy comfort.
DEGRADATION crashes through it with a thick industrial pulse and one of the album’s heaviest riffs. Much has been made of RØRY learning to scream for this record, but she uses that new weapon sparingly. Brief eruptions of harsh vocals add abrasion without becoming a novelty, while most of the performance remains clean and loaded with desperation. The result feels less like an artist suddenly trying to sound aggressive and more like someone finding the precise voice required by each emotion.
The outstanding SWALLOW proves how effective that instinct can be. Musically, it is not necessarily the album’s darkest moment, but the grief it carries makes it one of its most difficult. Written from the shadow left by losing her mother to cancer at 22, it allows different vocal rhythms to bleed into one another; even the much-discussed middle section feels closer to urgent rhythmic phrasing than a forced rap detour. Then comes the repeated “I just wanna go” of its closing passage, a moment already powerful on record and potentially overwhelming in concert. RØRY has spoken about fans crying when she first played it to them and questioned how she herself will endure that ending live. Following the striking accompanying video, the song stands as one of BLOODLETTING’s defining works.
The release it provides flows naturally into a cure for cancer. Despite its lower-case title and reflective mood, this is not another short spoken interlude but a complete song, carried by one of RØRY’s cleanest and most delicate performances. It makes room for vulnerability before MORTAL delivers arguably the heaviest riff on the entire album. Whispers and growls circle each other through the verses, but the chorus opens a window and allows light into the darkness. That balance makes it another of the record’s strongest cuts: heaviness used as emotional weight rather than decoration.
The album’s theatrical instincts then come sharply into focus. On [the death of a people pleaser], RØRY initially repeats “I’m the nicest person alive” with almost disarming sweetness. The performance gradually fractures until the same claim is being screamed in denial and despair. It is a compact but vital scene, capturing the death of the accommodating identity that kept excusing everyone else while disconnecting her from herself.
From that rupture emerges the vicious satire of KIDS THESE DAYS. Its muscular low end is immediately noticeable — Pete Daynes is credited on bass and backing vocals — while the chorus is commercial in the best possible sense: immediate, sharp and extremely difficult to dislodge. Behind the humour is a serious challenge to the generations that dismiss younger people for discussing trauma, seeking diagnoses and refusing Britain’s beloved tradition of quietly suppressing everything until it explodes. Rather than allowing the message to carry an ordinary song, RØRY gives it enough rhythmic weight and melodic bite to stand among the album’s best.
DEAD GIRL WALKING keeps the momentum alive with pounding drums, modern vocal cadences and another strong chorus. Its refusal to accept the music industry’s expectations around age, sobriety or reinvention is defiant, although the track feels less like a calculated anthem than a personal resurrection set to a heavy pulse. GREY is perfectly solid beside it and never damages the album’s flow, but it offers fewer surprises and leaves a lighter footprint than the songs surrounding it.
One of BLOODLETTING’s smartest choices is allowing these heavier pieces to coexist with quieter storytelling. The narrated [oh when the saints] sounds like RØRY addressing an audience in the room as she reflects on returning to Southampton. It leads directly into hometown, giving the acoustic song a context and emotional gravity it might not possess in isolation. For anyone who has left their birthplace to build a life elsewhere, its collision of distance, memory and the anxiety of returning will feel familiar. RØRY’s story is very specifically her own — one parent left that home and another is no longer alive to return to — but the feeling of discovering that a place has remained inside you even after you left it is universal.
That intimacy also shows why the album’s stylistic movement works. Industrial rock, alternative pop, acoustic songwriting, electronic textures, rhythmic vocals and spoken passages all occupy the same space without producing violent changes of identity. On a record this close to a concept album, variety becomes part of the storytelling. Different sounds allow different wounds to speak.
Penultimate track STRANGE becomes the album’s true musical finale. It may not reach the devastating heights of SWALLOW, but its dynamics should make it formidable live. The arrangement accelerates, strips back to leave RØRY’s voice exposed and then lets the instruments return gradually. It understands that intensity is not created by having everything turned up all the time; sometimes the drop and the space make the eventual impact much greater.
[do you want to live?] then serves as an epilogue rather than a conventional closing song. Different voices share moments when they wanted to die and the reasons they ultimately chose to remain, even when life appeared to have turned entirely against them. Each found something worth fighting for. It is openly emotional and explicit in its message, but the presence of real testimonies prevents it from feeling like a neat inspirational slogan pasted onto a complicated record.
BLOODLETTING does not pretend that healing makes somebody endlessly gracious, calm or complete. It recognises the uglier emotions that can survive alongside progress and gives RØRY permission to inhabit them without allowing them to have the final word. Not every track cuts with the same force, but the album remains cohesive despite its broad musical palette, while SWALLOW, MORTAL and KIDS THESE DAYS form a particularly formidable centre of gravity.
The question posed at the beginning is answered not by denying pain, but by passing through it. RØRY chooses life — furious, grieving, imperfect and fully felt.
Order Røry's Bloodleting on Amazon
Jose Crespo for The Riff Collective
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