NYC singer-songwriter ROREY blazes into emotional honesty with new single, "Hurts Me To Hate You." ROREY has already shown a gift for taking confession and shaping it into something that is as unsettling as it is healing, and this release may be her most personal to date.
The song unravels the tangled tension of mother-daughter relationships, weighed with generational pain, anger, and, eventually, acceptance. I wrote "Hurts Me To Hate You" when I was 21, realizing the anger I harbored toward my mother wasn't protecting me, but keeping me stuck in a cycle of pain ROREY shares. Even if she never really gets me, I still want her in my life. That meant taking her for who she was, and for what she had the capacity to give.
What makes "Hurts Me To Hate You" transformative isn't just its touching tenderness as a performance, but the universal relevance at its center. You can't change someone else, only your own feelings. With her own truth on display, ROREY has clear ground for radical empathy, the belief that healing might not be a straight line, but it's always there for the taking.
In the video below, which stars ROREY and her mother, the song's openness is compounded by an unblinkingly intimate clip. And what could have been a private homecoming for an adult son's private reckoning becomes an invitation for listeners to consider their own knotty histories of family, forgiveness, and self-responsibility. On this single, ROREY is sketching a space where confession inherits release, making music that feels less like entertainment and more like a companion through life's hardest reckonings.