Derry songwriter ROE returns with her second album, LOST DOG!, a record born from grief, heartbreak, loneliness and the strange, stubborn business of carrying on when life has knocked the shape out of things.
Released on 4 September and led by the single Team Player, LOST DOG! follows her acclaimed 2022 debut That’s When The Panic Sets In, which The Irish Times described as “an exceptionally sophisticated succession of confessional songs”. Since then, ROE has continued entirely independently, without a label or publisher, building the next chapter of her career with a small team around her and on her own terms.
Her music has never sat comfortably inside one genre. There are flashes of indie rock, folk, pop and grunge running through her work, with influences ranging from Orla Gartland and Medium Build to Rainbow Kitten Surprise. It is perhaps why ROE’s own description of herself as a resident of “genre purgatory” feels particularly apt.
Over the years, that songwriting has taken her from Derry to SXSW, Reeperbahn, Glastonbury’s BBC Introducing Stage and a UK arena tour supporting Snow Patrol, while her music has also found its way onto screen, including Tig Notaro’s Am I OK?
But LOST DOG! turns inward. At its centre is a period in which ROE says she felt “painfully lost”, including the death of her family dog, changing relationships and a profound sense of dislocation. Rather than forcing those experiences towards some neat conclusion, she let them become what she describes as a series of chaotic journal entries.
The result is an album about loss, certainly, but also about rediscovering why you began making music in the first place.
The Industry Review spoke to ROE about grief, independence, genre purgatory, growing up through songwriting and finding her way back into the land of the living.
Q&A
Q1. ‘LOST DOG!’ comes from a year you describe as one of grief, heartbreak and “stubborn forward motion”. When you hear the finished album now, does it feel like a document of the person you were during that year, or does it still feel emotionally present?
I don’t think those emotions ever fully disappear, so listening through the finished album brings up a lot of lurking feelings. I think as a writer I tend to put so much of myself into these songs because that’s my way of dealing with it (as problematic as that is). But I’m extremely proud.
This album unintentionally grew out of the heaviness and loss of this past while, and when I listen to it, I also think about how my excitement for music came back and how fulfilling it was to record these songs with my best friend (Liam) the way we used to at the beginning of my career. LOST DOG! is the product of a lot of love.
Q2. The loss of your family dog sits at the emotional centre of the album, and you’ve spoken about animals becoming the glue that holds a family together. Did writing about that grief change the way you understood it, particularly a kind of bereavement that people can sometimes underestimate?
I’ve had a few ‘oh sh*t’ moments when explaining the meaning of LOST DOG!. I’ve gone my whole life having animals around the house, and they become so ingrained in your everyday routine, so when it came to addressing that grief and listlessness within the record, I started to recognise how big of an impact it truly had. It wasn’t just the loss of a family pet, it was the loss of caring for a soul other than my own.
Maybe it’s silly, they’re just dogs after all, but when they’re the main reason to get up in the morning and an instant cure for getting outside of my own head, then the absence seems infinite.
Q3. You said, “I felt painfully lost.” There’s something very exposed about admitting that without immediately turning it into a story of triumph or recovery. Were you conscious of resisting a neat emotional resolution when you were making the record?
This record knitted itself together without any grand plan in place. I was writing through the fog to keep my sanity together, and it wasn’t until I thought I might have an album on my hands that I realised how intertwined these songs are.
Honestly, it feels like a series of chaotic journal entries rather than an open-and-shut case, and I kind of love it. I like writing songs that don’t resolve sonically, so it makes sense to create a record that reflects that too.
Q4. ‘Team Player’ takes loneliness and the feeling of existing on the outskirts of friendship groups, then filters it through the world of 90s high-school films like ‘Clueless’ and ‘10 Things I Hate About You’. Why did that cinematic world feel like the right way into something so personal?
I grew up on those movies and absolutely obsessed over the soundtracks. There’s something about that era of cheesy rom-com high-school cinema that’s timeless. I’ve had a clear vision of big-screen visuals for every song on the album during the writing process, and Team Player immediately belonged to that world.
Q5. There’s a striking line at the heart of ‘Team Player’: “Girl makes friends, girl loses friends, girl wonders what would have happened if she was somebody cooler.” **This isn’t a lyric in the song, just a way I summed it up 🙂
Does songwriting allow you to revisit older versions of yourself with more compassion, or are you still as hard on that younger self as you were at the time?
Because I’ve been writing songs since I was 14 years old, I’ve unintentionally kept a record of the biggest, most personal plot points of my life, and sometimes it feels like opening up old wounds when I listen back.
I’ve learned a lot over the years, including how to be more gentle with myself. Teenage me would think the world was ending every time I made a mistake or something went wrong, but I think time shifts perspective, and I wish I could tell younger me how things always work out in the end.
Q6. The record moves through grief, heartbreak, loneliness and change, but there’s also humour in titles like ‘Pissing Contest’, ‘Bucketlist (apocalypse song)’ and ‘Dogs (interlude)’. How important is humour when you’re writing about things that might otherwise become unbearably heavy?
It’s one of my favourite ways to approach dark and scary things, and I think it’s also a very Irish way of thinking.
If you’ve ever been to a wake here, you’ll know that through all the heaviness of a death, people gather round the house to share stories and laugh about years gone by, and there’s a familiar warmth that comes from that. So when I start writing about topics I know are extremely upsetting, I love to emulate that feeling.
Q7. Your music has been described as living in “genre purgatory”, with influences stretching from Orla Gartland to Medium Build and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Do you find the industry’s need to categorise artists creatively useful at all, or does it become another box you have to keep kicking your way out of?
I’m a big fan of the creativity used to create new genres in this day and age because the reality is that very rarely can you pen an artist/band under one umbrella. It opens a whole can of worms when I’m asked what genre I belong to because sometimes it’s indie folk and a lot of the time it’s indie rock, but the melodies I write are extremely pop and the guitars scream grunge, so I’ve settled on being a resident of genre purgatory or maybe ‘indie-other’? But honestly, the question of ‘does this fit my genre?’ never comes into the equation when I’m writing, so the industry can choose whatever box they want to. It doesn’t affect what I release. The beauty of being independent!
Q8. Your debut, ‘That’s When The Panic Sets In’, was praised for its confessional writing. Four years on, where do you hear the biggest difference between the songwriter who made that record and the artist who made ‘LOST DOG!’?
I was specifically writing toward my first album and the story I wanted to share within it, so That’s When The Panic Sets In was more structured when it came to the writing process, whereas LOST DOG! was written with the intention of escaping how devastated I had become because of the changes in my life. My influences have also changed (I’ve been listening to a lot of Wednesday, Dove Ellis, Hailaker), and the way I write tends to shift with that.
I’ve grown as a songwriter in the last few years, so I’m not exactly the same person as I was back then, and I don’t view things in the same way. I think I’ve become less cynical and more hopeful. Both records were a labour of love, but LOST DOG! has been a significantly more laid-back and come-what-may approach, and it has been revolutionary for my mental health.
Q9. Everything since the debut has been made independently, without a label or publisher, alongside a small, dedicated team. Has that independence given you greater artistic freedom, or does being responsible for so much of the machinery around the music inevitably alter your relationship with creating it?
Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned to cherish the freedom of releasing independently. Burnout is a real possibility when you’re personally responsible for every tiny detail, to the point where it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning because you’re so anxious about making the right call. It’s easy to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty industry side of things and forget that the reason you started creating art was for the love of it.
Having worked myself out of burnout on multiple occasions, I’ve started to approach my career in an entirely different way, and in general I think artists are beginning to realise how important it is to put your own health above your goals. I don’t strive for perfection anymore (it’s an impossible thing to achieve, especially on an indie budget!), and through releasing that pressure, I’ve found so much enjoyment in the artistic process again.
Q10. You’ve taken your music from Derry to SXSW, Reeperbahn, Glastonbury’s BBC Introducing Stage and a UK arena run supporting Snow Patrol. When songs begin in such an intimate place, what is it like watching them become communal experiences in front of audiences far beyond the room where they were written?
It’s such a bizarre feeling. Over the years, I’ve heard hundreds of stories about how something I’ve written has given comfort to someone or put words to the feelings they just couldn’t express, and I can’t begin to tell you how fulfilling that is. I started writing for myself, but quickly learned that there’s power in the songs I write, and there’s meaning that exists within them other than my own.
It makes me see the world in a different light, and I’m the luckiest person alive to be able to travel to and make memories in these places because of creating something.
Q11. Your music has also appeared in film, including ‘Am I OK?’. Do songs begin life for you as very specific pieces of autobiography, or do you deliberately leave enough space inside them for somebody else to walk in and recognise their own life?
Some people write in diaries; teenage me wrote songs with the four chords she knew how to play. I still get the slight hitch of breath knowing that pieces of myself are out on display because of sharing what I write. But even now, I don’t shy away from specifics in my writing. There’s something very cathartic about that.
The space for interpretation is there even if I’m not writing around it, which is such a lovely thing about songwriting. Listeners always seem to find part of their own story within my own.
Q12. The final image behind ‘LOST DOG!’ is of you writing beside a puppy who has spent all her energy chasing wasps around the room. After an album shaped by loss and volatile change, what does moving forward mean to you now, and has making this record changed your idea of what a new beginning looks like?
There are things we can’t control. Life, death, the weather. The older I get, the more heartbreak and devastation I know I’m going to experience. It’s inevitable. Those things can be so overwhelming that it feels like you will be in the grey for the rest of your life.
But there will always be joy that quietly creeps in, until eventually you find yourself in a place that you had forgotten even existed. This record, to me, was that joy. LOST DOG! shoved me back into the land of the living and made me realise how fun creating music can be. This album has been a new beginning in itself.
And moving forward, in this moment, I feel hopeful again.
Find out more info on ROE here.
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