Deathbyromy and I catch up to talk about love. That, plus religion and slut-shaming. We were meant to talk in February but she lost her voice mid-tour due to singer’s nodes. “It really sucks,” she texted me from Paris. “I had a few heavy years of smoking as a teenager and it permanently altered my voice. And I taught myself screamo with no education, so I kind of fucked myself.”
Romy Maxine Flores is a 26-year-old heavy pop artist born and raised in Los Angeles. Poignant whispers followed by bleeding screams permeate her records. It’s eerie, nightmarish and unabashedly toxic. “It’s me and my art against the world,” she declares. “I’m not afraid of anything. I live passionately and never in vain.”
We fit in a chat once she is back in her hometown. She has been awake since six, as always – an insomniac since infancy. Her eyebrows are bleached and sit above a bridge piercing between the eyes. She is tattooed with barbed wire, cobwebs and an outline of her bones. Her first tattoos were done by herself aged 13, then she continued to get inked at the late Lil Peep’s house, who she knew from around LA.
It’s a classic to search for a woman from your past in everyone you meet – that’s my first thought when I see Romy. Her vibe echoes two artists from my past: Muñeki77a (my nu-metal bestie back in Argentina) and Mango in Euphoria (a French punkstar I briefly knew). By the industry, however, she’s described as “the love-child of Lady Gaga and Marilyn Manson”.
In France, Romy has just done a photoshoot in her hotel room handcuffed to a rail, crumpled on the floor like a doll and wearing a lace mask from designer Maya Klingelschmidt. This is thematic – at the time, she was releasing “BDSM”, a “toxic but honest” dark-pop anthem about love. On the single cover, she’s wearing a decadent ball gag threaded with pearls. Romy admits “BDSM” is not the healthiest love song – at the core of it is “a love you feel in the bone” that has you “questioning if it’s right or wrong and if the person you see in the mirror is the same person you see next to you in bed.”
Also on her Paris itinerary is attaching a “love lock” to the Pont des Arts. The practice has been heavily discouraged since 2015, when over one million tons of dangling locks caused a section of the bridge to collapse. So she gets back to posting reels instead – this time in a vampiric lounge caressing an Edward Cullen-esque beauty, captioned: “When he asks if I care but I’d literally drink his spit + eat him bones and all”.
She tells me: “As humans, I believe love is our purpose.” Be it romantic or platonic love, with a neighbour or a stranger, she considers it the greatest driving force in life and loves any opportunity to celebrate it. But the greatest love of her life is herself: “It’s with myself, my career and my art that I am most enriched, entangled and honoured.”
Heartbreak has struck her for as long as she can remember, but she refuses to lend it enough power to jade her. “It’s put me in my lowest places and given me the opportunity to dig myself out again and again. Each time stronger and more whole than the last,” she says. And yet, she tells me, she has a crush for the first time in a while after breaking up with someone some months ago. “It’s very sweet and tender.”
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When Romy calls me from Los Angeles the following April, she is already focused on her next single: “Body Horror”. It’s a reflection on traumatic experiences from her adolescence, when she felt objectified by men. “I only turned 16 when all the boys around wanted to sink their teeth / And, much to my surprise, it was a guarantee that I’d be called a whore before my 17th,” go the lyrics.
“It’s the experience of feeling totally used while growing into a woman and trying to figure out my own relationship with my sensuality, only to feel that no matter how much ownership I have over it, it’s ultimately controlled by the male gaze.” She visually represents this feeling as a ballerina on a hospital bed surrounded by medics.
Romy first started releasing music aged 15, after she was bullied out of school for her gothic style. She says her classmates didn’t “get” it. Now, in her mid-twenties she’s “re-exploring Romy and who she is at 26” after losing herself in a string of long-term monogamous relationships.
Romy craves a music scene that Los Angeles lacks. “Everyone in this city thinks we’re all watching their show and that they’re the centre of the earth,” she says. Instead of a circuit of live bands, she found her tribe through the internet. Despite this, she finds it “very, very silly to spend time online. Big waste of a life.” She has noticed many people from the alternative scene turning to religion in recent years in pursuit of community, from Christianity to Wicca.
“I can’t wait to be a girlfriend, ‘cause last time I was the boyfriend and sometimes the mother or the therapist and occasionally the dog,” she writes on Instagram. This year, her exploration through art is dedicated solely to herself. “I’m dancing in the ecstasy of my own destruction … I love being a wild woman.”