RØRY – BLOODLETTING
RØRY – BLOODLETTING
SADCØRE RECORDS
Release date: 11/09/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
8/10
BLOODLETTING transforms therapy into a knife fight and gives the microphone to grief, rage, and resentment.
There’s a certain level of insult involved in receiving everything you have ever wanted and realizing that happiness does not have a money-back guarantee. RØRY has received her Top 10 album, her sobriety, her boyfriend, her child, her entire gift basket. But she’s also discovered a drawer she forgot existed, labeled GRIEF, ANGER, MORTALITY, locked tightly shut since around 2009, clinking. BLOODLETTING is RØRY opening it.
Imagine the barber-surgeon of three hundred years ago standing in a room constructed of stained glass and unpaid bills, a bowl in his hand and telling her that the cure to all of her problems is letting some of her blood spill onto the floor. Instead, she chose to become sober. She’s created a life for herself. And she managed to find him anyway, because this record is the result of finally allowing the treatment to take place.
The idea behind this work is deliberately medieval. In those days, the doctors drained the blood from a sick patient, based on the belief that the illness was housed in the blood and there was just too much of it. RØRY has come to the realization after a few hundred years too late that doctors had the right idea. Sadness has been trying to call her throughout her entire career – sadness has been calling, she has picked up, no ringing necessary. The anger has been sitting in the passenger seat the whole time, wearing shades in the middle of the night, waiting for the opportunity to take over the wheel. On BLOODLETTING, it does.
‘[welcome to bloodletting]’ is the knife cutting into her flesh before the anesthetics even begin to drip. ‘DEGRADATION’ re-affirms this point – this isn’t her sad album. This is the monster behind her sadness, using the same clothes to gain access but not remaining reasonable once inside. There is only so much time until, by law, you will have to bite a microphone in two pieces.
‘SWALLOW’ takes the metaphor of bloodletting and turns it into reality, a song about the act of swallowing every unsaid grievance she’s ever swallowed since she was young, and somewhere in the song, something huge is swallowed down a very small throat. ‘a cure for cancer’ is hidden in the lyrics, written in lowercase letters as though it was trying to avoid subpoena. ‘MORTAL’ is the track after that, delivered with the cool of the person who has toured every funeral home in order to select the carpets, the reminder that nothing you have counted for the chips you own changes the appointment you inevitably keep.
‘[the death of a people pleaser]’ is when the bleeding begins. RØRY has taken singing lessons so that she could scream – hiring a singing instructor to teach you how to sound like you’re being ripped apart by an unseen entity – and rage doesn’t care about doing scales. It just comes, in full form, in someone else’s blood, and demands to know why you have been keeping it waiting so long.
‘KIDS THESE DAYS’ is something that your uncle says over the carving knife during Christmas dinner and turns out to be one of the nastiest songs on the album. ‘DEAD GIRL WALKING’ used to be a metaphor, used and reused by other artists before it becomes one of theirs. Deep within an album obsessed with death, however, it is no longer borrowed. It is the narration of her own autopsy, performed from outside of her body, where she is taking notes, moderately impressed with the results.
‘GREY’ is the record’s one clean bandage, its single ballad arriving just in time when the wound needs a chance to heal over. RØRY is not pretending that the process of healing is straightforward – you can be sober, you can be successful, you can articulate yourself in three different languages, and still be so unhappy on a Tuesday morning that you want to throw a chair through the moon. ‘[oh when the saints]’ takes the bones of gospel music and turns them into something considerably less forgiving, the hymn sang by a congregation that realized that forgiveness is not free the moment the collection plate became empty.
‘hometown’ brings the whole record back to its roots, to the piece of earth that grew a girl who has been apologizing for breathing too loudly ever since. She’s not returning to the old home. She’s kneeling in the flower bed with a trowel. Being the bigger person, forgiving others, understanding others, and making excuses for others – you get so good at being reasonable you start disappearing from your own life, and somebody has to dig you up from wherever you have buried yourself.
‘STRANGE’ comes in as the new anthem, as the closest thing to daylight in the record, the song designed to scream it out of the window of your car at a stoplight, while the other driver decides what to do – whether to change lanes or file a report. The record starts on ‘welcome to bloodletting’, and ends with ‘do you want to live?’ – the procession through the Victorian hospital led by a ghost that has learned how to play post-hardcore. Somewhere in the middle, the people pleaser dies, the saints arrive uninvited, and everybody starts screaming at once. I’ve been to weddings with less drama.
‘[do you want to live?]’ ends where the record began – the scalpel is still out, and the question has nowhere to go. She doesn’t answer it. Answering it would have been a nice thing to do, and nice is the sickness that this record was designed to drain out of her.
The danger of such emotional maximalism is that it can turn the darkness into costume, that it can make you heavy simply for the sake of better pictures. RØRY manages to dodge it, because the details are too specific to fake – you don’t create the swamp of self-help books drowned in tears unless you have been wading through it.
Many people have discovered their rage in a car park, in a group chat or in a courtroom that has issued a restraining order. RØRY found hers after the trophies were already on the shelves, after the story was supposed to end, which makes this record unusual compared to the rage album – there’s nobody left to blame anymore. Just a woman alone with a bowl, watching herself filling it, and mildly surprised by how much of it was still inside her.
A few tracks that carry the greatest weight on the album dive into the screaming so deeply that they begin to perform the damage instead of describing it. There is a more concise version of this album hidden in the margins of this album. To ask RØRY to condense it would be to ask her to become nice about it, and nice is exactly the disease she has spent thirteen tracks of draining from herself.
BLOODLETTING doesn’t offer you the comforting lie that survival changes you into someone who spends Sunday mornings making sourdough and forgiving all the people who wronged you. Survival sometimes means that you’re still alive, you’re angry, and you have stopped apologizing for the noise. Give a woman a decade of rage, a vocal coach, and a bowl, and this is the blood transfusion you’ll get – grief wearing a metal album like a hospital gown, calmly walking out of the ward it has never been discharged from.
TRACKLISTING:
01. [welcome to bloodletting]
02. DEGRADATION
03. SWALLOW
04. a cure for cancer
05. MORTAL
06. [the death of a people pleaser]
07. KIDS THESE DAYS
08. DEAD GIRL WALKING
09. GREY
10. [oh when the saints]
11. hometown
12. STRANGE
13. [do you want to live?]
LINKS:
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