DeathbyRomy

Los Angeles musician Romy Flores channels a nightmarish strain of electronic pop through her DeathbyRomy project, alternating between sparse, plaintive textures and denser hip-hop beats supplied by guest rappers. After launching the endeavor in the mid-2010s, she issued her debut full-length, Monsters, in 2018 and continued refining that tormented fusion on the 2021 set Songs for My Funeral.

Flores, born and raised in L.A., took the DeathbyRomy alias at fifteen. Battling depression alongside episodes of bullying, she left high school early to focus on music, drawing on the subsequent couple of years spent surmounting those challenges as inspiration for her first album. A pair of early tracks, “Blood” and “Wonder Boy” featuring Violet Kennedy, surfaced online in 2016. Roughly a dozen further cuts arrived before Monsters, among them collaborations with Los Angeles hip-hop artists Glitter Princess and LePlay. The September 2018 album also featured Yung Bans, Lil B, and Cuban Doll. Several additional singles appeared in 2019, notably the blackbear-assisted “Dangerous,” alongside the EP Love U - to Death, whose frequently streamed highlight “Problems” later received a 2020 remix from pop-friendly rapper 24kGoldn. That same year DeathbyRomy maintained a steady output with tracks such as “Beautiful Mayhem” and “Fiending for a Lover,” while her ominous reinterpretation of the Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men” landed on the Promising Young Woman soundtrack. In 2021 the seven-song collection Songs for My Funeral combined previously issued material with fresh recordings.