Between her demonic growls and angelic cries, Gore. singer Haley Roughton’s voice sounds absolutely out of this world. Coincidentally, her day job has her preparing people for something equally unearthly: traveling to outer space.
For the past several years, the rising metalcore singer has been working as an engineer for the Spacewalk program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, she instructs astronauts on how to use their equipment and is helping to develop the next generation of lunar suits for future missions.
Since 2023, the metal-loving multitasker has also been boldly exploring a range of vocal techniques through her work with Gore. Above the djent-bounced extremity and dramatic melodicism of their two early songs, “Pray” and “Doomsday,” Roughton’s wildly elastic vocal cords deliver a virtuosic mix of R&B-like flourishes, soft-hush sensitivity and a house-leveling power-bellow honed over the years through various death-metal projects.
In the era of successful genre-bending outfits like Bad Omens and Sleep Token, it’s no surprise that a serious buzz is growing around Gore. What’s surprising, though, is the fact that the vocal phenom hid her dynamic talents in plain sight for decades.
“I grew up in a pretty traditional household, where you studied for things that’ll actually pay the bills,” Roughton explains, adding that she briefly considered a musical career in her youth, but chose science because it was the more practical option.
Roughton is discussing this while sitting in front of a pastel-pink floral backdrop in her Austin home, just moments before filming a one-take vocal run-through of “Babylon” — a ground-fracking track from the band’s debut EP, A Bud That Never Blooms. (A video of this will eventually be posted to the band’s socials.)
As Gore. ramp up for the much-anticipated release of their EP, they’ve amassed hundreds of thousands of streams and garnered support from notable names, including Chris Motionless and the veteran metalcore outfit Within the Ruins. (The latter recently took Gore. on their first-ever U.S. club tour.)
Clearly, people are rapidly coming around to the act’s exquisite brand of hummable heaviness. Now, after years spent muting her musical ambitions, Roughton is finally ready to see just how far her vocals can take her by going all-in with Gore.
Roughton was raised in Tucson, Arizona, where she listened to everything from Beyoncé to the alt-rock and nu-metal that her father introduced her to. She and her dad even attended Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine concerts together. But despite being raised in a family of music lovers, singing around the house wasn’t exactly encouraged. Instead, a teenaged Roughton would hop on her all-terrain quad bike, rip out to the far edge of their four-acre property and croon in solitude. “I was always really afraid to sing in front of people back then… I still kind of am now,” she reveals.
“My relationship with music was not great growing up, just because I felt like nobody wanted to hear anything that I wrote or played,” she continues. “So, I kept that deep desire hidden [during] childhood. I think there was a tiny voice inside of me that was like, ‘You’re not good enough, so just try engineering instead.’ Of course, that makes the parents happy.”
After high school, Roughton buried herself in her studies. While majoring in electrical engineering at Fort Worth’s Texas Christian University, she’d devote 80 hours a week to classes and homework. “I didn’t really make any friends until my adult years,” she says, “because I was so wound up [with school] and not worried about anything else but engineering.”
Roughton’s unwavering dedication paid off. Just as she was graduating, she was accepted into an internship program with NASA, which led to her current full-time position. Funnily enough, settling into a nine-to-five job afforded her more time on nights and weekends to explore her other passion: music. That’s when she decided it was finally time to start singing in a band.
While living in Houston, Roughton fell into the local metal scene and eventually made friends with a number of musicians. This led to vocal stints with a pair of symphonic death-metal factions: Dorzia and the Xebellian Triangle. As a kid, Roughton would sing into the void of her family’s “deserted horse arena.” Now, she was screaming herself raw for an enthusiastic metal legion. Perhaps for the first time ever, she felt fully supported as a performer.
“When I was in those local bands, people were so encouraging to me about my vocals,” she says. “[It felt] like, Oh, OK… I can keep doing this. I shouldn’t just shut myself off in a dark room and disappear.”
Roughton also knew she could do so much more than just scream. As a fan of not only brutal metal, but also pop music and the ethereal vocal acrobatics of Jeff Buckley, she had loftier ambitions. “I got kind of bored, because I was only doing growls,” she says now of her earlier all-harsh approach. “It didn’t quite fulfill me the way that Gore. does.”
A Bud That Never Blooms showcases Roughton as a confident performer who thrives within a wide spectrum of sound — but the path to forming Gore. was messy and fraught with challenges for the singer. In quick succession, she experienced a harsh romantic breakup, split with her death-metal bands and had a home purchase fall through.
In the aftermath, Roughton moved back into her mom’s place in Tucson — a regression she now admits wasn’t great for morale. But she soon started channeling all that frustration into new music, and something clicked. “I’m not saying that you should go through a hard time, or that that’s the only way to get good songs,” she offers, “but I don’t think it hurts, either.”
While Gore. was initially conceived as a solo project, Roughton ended up bringing a few old friends into the mix. The singer had met producer Caleb Freihaut while performing in the Xebellian Triangle, and later reached out about collaborating at his studio in St. Louis. She’d met guitarist Alex Reyes during his stint in Houston-based progressive metal-core group Apothica. Bassist Devin Birchfield was an online friend she’d been messaging through a djent-themed Facebook group for more than a decade. (In late 2024, the band welcomed drummer Wills Weller of New Jersey prog-metal veterans Toothgrinder into the lineup.)
As she was cementing bonds with her new Gore. bandmates, Roughton used her lyrics to analyze relationships that went by the wayside. Wrapped up in aching melodies and dark violet guitar, “Babylon” concerns being “anxiously attached to someone” while realizing their love for you is fading. Roughton explains that it’s also about putting her hopes for getting married and having children to rest, at least for the moment — topics you don’t normally hear about in a crushing metalcore song.
“The dream of the traditional family is not nearly as popular as it used to be — especially in metal, because metal is inherently anti-normalcy,” she says. “But for me, that’s my truth. I’m not going to sit here and be like, ‘Oh, I’m a girlboss — I don’t need a man!’ That’s not how I felt.”
The record concludes with the kabooming “Heaven Is Above Me,” a song that hints at family drama and faith-based experiences — fittingly, it incorporates a gospel-style choir. It’s likewise the lone track to fully reveal Roughton’s scale-climbing vibrato, rather than pivot between cleans and gnarly gutturals. No matter the approach, the singer explains that her Gore. lyrics are trafficking in the complexities of the human experience, and the figurative viscera we fling along the way.
“The idea behind ‘emotional gore’ is being raw, exposed and vulnerable. Letting people see all the parts of you,” Roughton relays, adding, “even if they’re a little bit ugly — as gore often is.”
Though Gore.’s debut EP runs the gamut from romance and religion to police violence and privilege, there’s one topic the band aren’t choosing to explore at the moment: space travel. As her band rockets towards an exciting music career, Roughton would rather keep her art separate from her day job.
“It’s very difficult to incorporate it without it being campy and cheesy,” she says — before conceding that they did write a song called “Orbiting” that “talks about celestial stuff.”
“But it’s not like, ‘Get it? ’Cuz she works for NASA!’ It’s not in your face. It’s more like a little nudge.”
She concludes: “The future of Gore. is much more ethereal. Otherworldly… but not necessarily about the galaxy.”