Romy Maxine Flores was fifteen when she dropped out of high school for music and twenty when Capitol Records signed her off the strength of a single, "Problems," that TikTok had already turned into a hit. By the time she got the deal off her back, she had learned enough about the industry to write an entire album about the person who nearly took it from her.
From Viral Single to Major-Label Machine
Flores had been releasing music as DeathbyRomy since 2017, starting with the self-released project level one loneliness complete and her debut single "Tiempo." Her self-produced 2018 album Monsters, featuring Lil B, Yung Bans, and Cuban Doll, showed a hip-hop-adjacent artist still finding her shape. Everything changed that October when "Problems" went viral and Capitol Records came calling within two months.
I only signed a record deal about two months ago now. Before that, I was mixing and releasing music independently.DeathbyRomy, PAPER Magazine
The Love U to Death EP followed weeks later, and over the next two years Flores built out a major-label run that included the Songs For My Funeral EP, a Kiiara collaboration alongside PVRIS on Atlantic's "Numb," and placements on the Promising Young Woman soundtrack. "Problems" remains her most-streamed track to date on both Spotify and YouTube, but the deal that made it possible did not last.
The Manager Who Became a Villain
By late 2021 or early 2022, Flores had quietly exited Capitol. She has since described that period bluntly, saying a manager figure from her label years "preyed on me as a young girl in this industry" and that she "was manipulated, tricked, used, and led astray by the one person posing as my best friend and caretaker." That experience did not stay buried. It became the literal antagonist woven through the narrative of HOLLYWOOD FOREVER, its music videos, and its promotional rollout, an unusually direct choice for an artist who could have simply moved on.
She didn't leave the industry story behind. She cast it as the villain and wrote an album to beat it.
Building HOLLYWOOD FOREVER
Since 2022, Flores has released everything through a distribution partnership with ONErpm, starting with the EP Entropy and continuing through singles like "No Mercy," "Hellhound" with Jazmin Bean, and "Waves" with Zeds Dead and Flux Pavilion, her first real bass-music crossover. That run built toward HOLLYWOOD FOREVER, released April 25, 2025, which her booking agency Wasserman Music has called "a love letter and a requiem to Los Angeles." XS Noize praised it as "a volatile blend of goth, dark pop, industrial rock, electronica, and punk," writing that DeathbyRomy "doesn't just challenge the conventions of pop, she dismembers them and rebuilds something far more visceral and compelling."
The album arrived alongside features from Palaye Royale on "PRAY TO ME" and Wargasm and bodyimage on "YUNG & RICH," pulling Flores further into rock and glam territory while keeping the corpse paint and cinematic staging that have defined her look for nearly a decade. It sits in a wider lane of goth-adjacent alt-pop that also includes acts like Kim Dracula, though Flores's version leans harder into hip-hop bones and orchestral dread than the darkwave revival currently reshaping pop's fringes elsewhere.
An Independent Machine
The commercial proof of the reinvention showed up on the road, not the charts. No DeathbyRomy release has publicly logged a Billboard entry, but her spring 2025 headline tour sold out most of its dates, and by year's end she had made her European headline debut in London, Utrecht, and Berlin, supported Enter Shikari across a sprawling fall run, and played Warped Tour dates in Orlando. Her Wasserman bio, current as of early 2026, cites more than 60 million cumulative global streams and 675,000 monthly Spotify listeners, numbers built almost entirely without a label pushing them.
In August 2025 she paired with TX2 on "Feed" through a one-off deal with Hopeless Records, the kind of targeted partnership that has replaced the full label contract in her business model since 2022. It is a small detail that says a lot: Flores will still let outside institutions into her orbit, just never enough to let one of them own her story again.
What Comes After the Requiem
Flores opened 2026 with the ShipRocked Cruise and the single "BDSM," then announced the expanded Manic Dream Tour across Europe, billed by Wasserman as ushering in a bolder, more cinematic "popstar" era. April brought "BODY HORROR," the first single from a still-untitled album centered on girlhood, which she has described as her most personal work yet. Nine years after a school-bus songwriter turned a suicidal period into a stage name built on reclamation, DeathbyRomy is still writing the same story, only now she is the one holding the pen.