REVIEW: ROREY Makes Sense of Love, Loss and Everything Left Unsaid on ‘I Get It Now’
WRITTEN BY MATILIA
✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩
There’s a point after a breakup where you understand exactly what happened and yet you’re still somehow asking yourself the same questions anyway. You know why it ended, what went wrong, and what you should do next—but your brain keeps circling back like maybe there’s one more explanation hiding somewhere that will finally make everything feel less awful. ROREY’s I Get It Now exists within that stage of heartbreak.
The album is less interested in the dramatic moment of a relationship ending than in what happens when the dust settles and none of the feelings have gone anywhere. ROREY moves through resentment, guilt, longing, self-protection and the kind of overthinking that feels like it’s become its own full-time job. The songs constantly contradict each other because she constantly contradicts herself. She wants closure but still craves contact. She knows she needs distance but still cares deeply about the person she is distancing herself from. She knows something hurt her and still doesn’t want to reduce the other person to a mere villain in her story.
“Binary Thinking” makes that contradiction obvious right away. ROREY goes back and forth between wondering whether she’s “the one that got away” and accepting that maybe the other person simply walked away because they wanted to. There’s something painfully familiar about how quickly the mind can switch between those two possibilities. One version protects your ego; the other destroys it. Neither actually gives you peace.
“Understated” carries that same push and pull, and it’s easily one of the album’s highlights. At first, ROREY sounds almost certain that love doesn’t have to be loud to be real. “Grand gestures are overrated,” she sings. But the reassurance starts slipping almost immediately, and before long, she’s back to wondering whether the other person even wants her. That makes the title hit a little differently. The relationship may be quiet, but so is the certainty she’s looking for.
A lot of I Get It Now works like that. One thought starts out sounding solid and then slowly caves in on itself.
“I’m sure,” for example, sounds firmer at first. ROREY knows her worth. She knows she is “so much more” than someone else’s projection of her. But even that certainty has clearly been hard won. She’s rebuilding after having spent too much time looking at herself through somebody else’s eyes. “Dying Fire” picks up another side of that process. She knows distance is necessary, but she still says the person is someone she could never hate.
The inability to make herself hate someone who hurt her becomes one of the more interesting tensions across I Get It Now. Anger would make things easier; it could turn a complicated relationship into something simple enough to walk away from without looking back. Instead, ROREY keeps finding herself stuck with affection that has nowhere useful to go. On “Give Me A Reason,” she practically asks the other person to make things easier for her: “Can you just give me a reason to hate you?” Months have passed, and she’s still searching for something definitive enough to overpower whatever feelings remain.
But ROREY doesn’t write heartbreak as though those feelings move in any sensible order. Throughout I Get It Now, the tracks travel through feelings of anger, nostalgia, defensiveness, hope, and exhaustion without treating any one of those emotions as the final destination.
This makes the record feel less like a straightforward breakup timeline and more like being dropped into someone’s head while they’re trying to sort through everything at once. Old memories keep interrupting new conclusions. A boundary can coexist with the desire to be wanted, and ROREY can recognize how badly a relationship affected her and then turn around and question herself anyway.
“Temporary Tragedy” puts some of that exhaustion into particularly blunt terms: she’s losing sleep, struggling to eat and wondering whether the two of them are stuck in a cycle where neither person ever really changes. The word “temporary” almost becomes the question. Is the relationship temporary? Is the pain? How long can something keep hurting before you stop thinking of it that way?
The album’s title becomes increasingly fitting because understanding is happening all over the record, just rarely at the same speed as acceptance. ROREY often seems perfectly capable of identifying what went wrong. The harder part is getting her emotions to catch up with what she already knows. That distinction is made clearest on the title track, which feels especially exposed because so much of it unfolds through conversation.
She talks about reaching out after months of silence, wanting closure and then feeling embarrassed that she cared enough to seek it. When another voice reassures her that she isn’t stupid and reminds her how much grace she gave the situation, it exposes how harshly she’s been judging herself for still being affected by it.
And maybe that self-judgment is another thing ROREY is beginning to understand. There’s a difference between knowing you should move on and being able to shut off years of attachment on command. One of the most affecting parts of I Get It Now is that she doesn’t pretend otherwise. She can be tired of talking about the relationship and still need to talk about it and know she deserves better and still miss what she had.
So I Get It Now never really arrives at the satisfying version of closure where every question has an answer and every feeling has been neatly put away. Its clarity is much less convenient than that. ROREY understands that love can be real and still not be enough and that choosing yourself doesn’t immediately erase the part of you that wanted someone else to choose you too.
The album’s title isn’t a declaration that she’s over it. It’s the realization that she finally sees the relationship for what it was—and now has to live with what she knows.