Hawks: Emma Rosie, Demi

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.

Neither artist entertains the rivalry. In fact, when Rosie was asked about Hawks in a recent NME interview, she smiled. “Demi scares me in the best way. She writes like someone who has nothing left to lose. I write like someone who’s afraid of losing everything. Same coin, different sides.” emma rosie, demi hawks

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. Her stage presence is volcanic

Though one hails from the fog-soaked folk trails of the Pacific Northwest and the other from the gritty, synth-heavy basements of East London, both artists share a singular mission: to weaponize vulnerability. They are not just singers; they are archivists of the messy, beautiful chaos of young adulthood. If you close your eyes and listen to Emma Rosie’s 2024 breakout EP, Saltwater Stains , you can smell the rust on a fire escape and feel the humidity of a sleepless summer. Rosie, 23, possesses a voice that cracks like old leather—warm, worn, and impossibly honest. Neither artist entertains the rivalry

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.”