DeathbyRomy knows a few things about Los Angeles. The city of her birth has been an inspiration and a cautionary tale, a place of ecstasy and trauma, darkness and light. It is the fuel behind her songs of dark pop, chaos, and melody. She went through a few things to get here.
“The city raised me,” she says. “I dropped out of high school at 15. I instantly got into working full-time and trying to create music. I started DeathbyRomy. This city is where I started everything. It’s what’s inspired and been the background to every romance, every hard moment of my life, has been here in L.A.”
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Her new album, Hollywood Forever (released in April), is a document of those experiences, built on pop hooks and industrial grind. The independent release and accompanying music videos reveal a dynamic collision of interests that has Romy as comfortable amid pop artists as at your local heavy metal festival.
“DeathbyRomy for me is this really fucked up embodiment of everything I was into as a kid,” Romy explains. “I was drawn to things with very dark and provocative themes very early, just out of the shock value that existed in things like Alexander McQueen and Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga and Harajuku Fashion. Things that really amazed and scared me are the things that inspired me the most.”
In the real Los Angeles, most of the city has very little to do with the entertainment world, aside from the local population being active consumers of it. Just like any other American metropolis, it is filled more by teachers and laborers, plumbers and retail workers, and is a natural magnet for immigrants. But people also come from around the world to be a part of the local industry of movies, TV, music, etc., and many are in for a disappointing and bumpy ride.
On the breathless, raging “La La Land,” Romy describes an entertainment society that is bleak and transactional: “Concrete cocaine / Fake tits migraines / Transplants suck dick just to get into L.A. / Fake friends / Fake numbers / Suffocate or be smothered / Either way you’re going under.”
From the song’s intense, mantra-like chorus, Romy has lyrics tattooed in huge script along her arms—“Dog eat dog” along her right arm, and “God eat god” on her left.
“Certain things I write have scared me,” she admits with a laugh, “but as a lot of people say, you only start living once you finally reach the edge of your comfort zone.”
The album is named after her favorite place in the city, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the 126-year-old final resting place for generations of the famous and infamous: silent film actor Rudolph Valentino and gangster Bugsy Siegel, Wizard of Oz co-stars Judy Garland and the dog Toto (real name Terry), surrealist filmmaker David Lynch and punk originator Dee Dee Ramone. The graveyard is also a useful metaphor about fame and the darker corners of the entertainment industry, grinding out and grinding up generations of artists and would-be stars.
Amid all that, DeathbyRomy (aka Romy Flores) is a woman with gothic flair, her appearance meticulous and detailed, with long dark hair, shaved eyebrows, and barbed wire tattooed across her knuckles. The words “Wish you were here” are written across her throat. She looks like the offspring of Marilyn Manson.
“I found that I enjoyed sticking out and I enjoyed making people uncomfortable through my own expression because art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, as they’ve always said,” Romy explains. “And I feel like I gain a lot of confidence and power in doing that through my physical expression.”
She’s sitting in the red brick bar of The Moroccan Lounge in downtown L.A., after completing her band’s soundcheck. It’s 15 minutes before doors open to the fans lining up outside for the last night of her first-ever U.S. headline tour. Tickets are sold out.
“DeathbyRomy fans are freaks,” she says. “They’re outcasts. They’re weirdos. We were all the kids who didn’t get along—whether it was in school, whether it was at church, whether it was at camp. Thankfully, the honesty I’ve been able to pour into my music has really resonated and found other people who feel embraced by the strangeness that is this world I’ve created.”
Last night in Berkeley, she joked to the crowd, “Wow, I never thought I’d have a room full of sick motherfuckers who would sing along to these lyrics with me.”
In July, she began a European tour, with multiple festivals also on the horizon, plus a stop at the Warped Tour in Orlando on November 15.
DeathbyRomy is a solo project, but on the road, she travels and performs with two women beside her, guitarist Jayden Hammer and bassist Cheska Zaide (aka Earth to Cheska)—putting three women at the front of the stage. “I’d always envisioned a girl band,” says Romy. “There’s always power in numbers.”
By the end of the night, she and her guitarist and bassist will be down to their bikini tops and tattoos. For her, being provocative is part of the fun and the point.
“Me and the girls are very empowered by getting to jump around in a small amount of clothing,” Romy says. “Honestly, it’s like a big ‘fuck you’ to people who assume women can’t play instruments and be sexy, which is kind of hysterical, but a very real thing, unfortunately. I mean, you’re only young once and I enjoy DeathbyRomy to scream confidence, because it’s not like I was always this comfortable in my own skin. But now that I am, I feel like I owe it to myself and the young girls and boys and everyone who follows me to have an image of confidence and strength.”
A new single, “Guerra,” was quickly recorded and released June 12, and has Romy raging to a pounding electronic riff with frayed nerves and anger stirred by recent events in Los Angeles: immigration raids, masked ICE agents, and soldiers in the street. “Fuck the world and the head of state,” she roars on the track. “White man’s world / We exist to serve / I’m not gonna run / Hope I’m striking a nerve.”
“I felt it was a very necessary political statement for what’s going on right now,” says Romy, who is herself half-Latina.
On the album, Romy is as much of a target in biting confessional songs like “Bitchfamous,” with lyrics of romantic betrayal inspired by her own regrets and misadventure. She sings: “No more innocent blood left in my body / When did lust and greed become the same?”
“I made a big mistake and got messy blackout drunk one night and cheated on someone I really, really loved,” Romy says of the song. “Being candid and brutally honest is something we owe people as artists and we owe ourselves as well. So that song, even though I was scared to put it out, it’s all the more reason to do so.”
Her foundational music influences include Kanye West, Marilyn Manson, Sleigh Bells, MIA, the Beatles, Lady Gaga, and the White Stripes. She picked the name DeathbyRomy at age 16, “in a rushed and last-minute effort to have something to put on the flyer for my first ever show.” But it had real meaning for her.
“At the time I was a very emotionally unstable teenager who really felt lost in the world and lost in myself and my body,” she explains. “I struggled with suicidal ideations and suicidality for a long, long time. So DeathbyRomy was meant to mean ‘death by something beautiful.’ And my relationship with life and death has always been something I hold very dear. It’s always inspired my music and art.”
As the daughter of caterers who worked in the entertainment world, young Romy got an early glimpse of Hollywood from behind the scenes, if not exactly access. She was a child when she accompanied her parents to a catering job at L.A.’s Staples Center, where Lady Gaga was performing on her 2010 The Monster Ball tour.
“She saw this little girl, me, walking around her green room, kind of sneaking around trying to catch a glimpse of her, and she was nothing but so kind to me,” Romy recalls of meeting Gaga that night.
More recently, she finally met Manson at a Rammstein concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2022. “I think I perplexed him, in the best way,” she recalls. “I was pretty drunk that night at the Coliseum, and I was so into the show. I’d never seen Rammstein live. We just shot the shit and chatted about a bunch of random things, interests, music, art.”
In some ways, DeathbyRomy shares a lane with Poppy, another artist with competing impulses in extremes in pop and noise. On the album is “Yung and Rich,” an alternately grinding and catchy track featuring the U.K. industrial duo Wargasm and L.A.-based singer body image, as Romy rages about young peers in L.A. who were given everything by their affluent families.
“I wrote that song and recorded it when I was 19, and all the vocals you hear on that song are my voice at 19,” she says. “I was a very aggressive and salty kid growing up in L.A., not having parents who had means of just handing me a studio or all the equipment I needed to make my dream happen, and watching other kids really sit on their privilege made me angry.”
Within the songs on Hollywood Forever is a running theme based on experiences very early in her career with a manager who she says “manipulated and preyed on me.” Back then, Romy was still a teen putting her own songs up on Soundcloud. And she describes the offenses as personal, emotional, and physical.
“I looked up to him as like a big brother and a guardian,” she says. “I lived on his couch and lived with him and his first fiancé, and one day things started going wrong. I didn’t realize I was being very manipulated by that person.”
She doesn’t name the manager or offer specifics on her experiences, but has created a character in her songs and videos where she acts out the dynamic. By contrast, a look at pictures of her in those early teenage days of DeathbyRomy shows a very young artist just coming out of childhood. “I was a fucking baby, dude,” she says now. “I put myself into the world of adults very early and was forced to be in and around it. The industry’s full of drugs and alcohol and abuse and manipulation and coercion, and I didn’t have industry parents to guide me through this world. I learned a lot of hard lessons, but I also learned a lot of really incredibly important ones.”
Romy is 25 now, and a seasoned performer fully aware of the trappings of the music industry and Hollywood in general. She is currently managed by a firm founded by Grammy-winning, multi-platinum producer Rob Cavallo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance, etc.), who Romy first met when she was signed to Capitol Records. Usually on the road with the band is her hands-on manager at the firm, Ally Duesbury, who is also a friend and creative collaborator Romy describes as “my other half.”
By the time of her 2022 Entropy EP, DeathbyRomy had evolved into an artist with sharper edges, both in sound and vision. Now with Hollywood Forever, she feels like she’s finally arrived at her fully formed self, with more adventures to come.
“I’m really just getting started,” Romy says. “This album was a perfect stamp on the world that I needed to really prove myself as the artist I’ve always wanted to be, and the artist I always knew I could be.”
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