Whether alone or someday together (a joint tour is the holy grail for their fanbase), one thing is clear: Emma Rosie and Demi Hawks are not fleeting trends. They are the whispered beginning of a new canon—artists who remind us that the most radical thing a young woman can do in 2026 is be unflinchingly, messily, gloriously real. Seek out the unofficial “Sad Girl Starter Pack” playlist on Spotify, curated by fans, which alternates Rosie’s “Lighthouse” with Hawks’ “Concrete Angel.” Just keep tissues nearby.
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.
Hawks grew up in the foster system, a fact she refuses to exploit for pathos but cannot separate from her art. “When you’re moved from house to house, you learn that silence is dangerous,” she explains during a chaotic backstage interview before a sold-out show at London’s The Windmill. “So I fill every second. My songs are clutter. They’re the stuff you hide in your closet.” emma rosie, demi hawks
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.
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.” Whether alone or someday together (a joint tour
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.” Her rise was accidental
Demi Hawks, meanwhile, is writing a short film and scoring a BBC drama about queer joy in the 1980s coal miners’ strikes. “Songs are too small a container for me now,” she says. “I want to build worlds.”