Hawks grew up in the foster system, a fact she refuses to exploit for pathos but cannot separate from her art. “When you’re moved from house to house, you learn that silence is dangerous,” she explains during a chaotic backstage interview before a sold-out show at London’s The Windmill. “So I fill every second. My songs are clutter. They’re the stuff you hide in your closet.”
Demi Hawks, meanwhile, is writing a short film and scoring a BBC drama about queer joy in the 1980s coal miners’ strikes. “Songs are too small a container for me now,” she says. “I want to build worlds.” emma rosie, demi hawks
Lyrically, Hawks is a poet of the digital age’s loneliness. Her song “DM Slide” isn’t a love song—it’s a forensic takedown of performative intimacy, set to a beat that sounds like a dying Game Boy. Meanwhile, the piano-driven ballad “Social Housing” chronicles her childhood with a chilling simplicity: “The walls had mold / But they held / Better than the people.” Hawks grew up in the foster system, a
Hawks, upon hearing this, laughed. “Emma is the sister I never had. She makes you feel held. I make you feel seen. There’s room for both.” Emma Rosie is currently in seclusion in a remote cabin in Washington state, recording her debut full-length album with producer Blake Mills (Perfume Genius, Fiona Apple). Rumors suggest a more electric, percussive sound—what Rosie calls “folk music that kicks the door down.” My songs are clutter
Her stage presence is volcanic. During a recent performance of her track “Spite,” she dismantled her own drum kit mid-song, handed the snare to a fan, and finished the track using only a broken cymbal and a megaphone. The audience wept and moshed in equal measure.
Her rise was accidental. A classical piano prodigy who rejected conservatory at 19, Rosie spent two years working graveyard shifts at a 24-hour diner in Portland, Oregon. She wrote songs on napkins about customers: the trucker who cried into his coffee, the newly single mother counting quarters.