By Kuya Allen
Photos by Maytal Etehad
The thing people get wrong about independent artists is that they think the hard part is the freedom
Freedom is the easy half. Freedom is a decision you make once. Anyone can decide to answer to nobody. What almost nobody can do is take the world living inside their head and get other people to move into it, work inside it for months, defend it in a room where it would be easier to make something normal, and treat it like it is real before there is any evidence that it is.
A label solves that with a budget. It assigns you a creative director, a stylist, a video commissioner, and their belief in you arrives as a line item.
Romy didn’t have that, so she had to go find people who believed on their own
She gives them a lot to believe in. Every record she has made comes with a world attached, built all the way down. "2468" arrived as a fifteen-page treatment with Concept by Romy on the cover: a misfit cheerleader trapped in a squad she doesn't fit, until the camera pulls back and the cheerleaders are soldiers and the captain is a general. Same bodies, same drills, different uniform.
She knew what the double-speed verse would do to the playback.
She knew which syllable the slap lands on.
It’s this kind of precision that separates Romy from the pack. Building a world in your head is one skill, writing the map to hand to other people is entirely another.
The people who took the map aren’t just “staff” either. Ally manages her. Elena Lark styles her. They are close, they are friends. From the outside, they look closer to a family than a chain of command. And that TLC shines through on all of her projects.
We asked Romy what the best part of being independent is, and she doesn't reach for anything about ownership or masters or equity.
"Doing whatever the fuck I want."
"2468" is a video about a girl who refuses to stand in formation, and it took a room full of misfits to make it.