It’s no exaggeration to say that School of Rock’s existence is the reason this site exists. What started as an initial love (read: obsession) with that film as a nine year old grew into a life long love of music, a belief in the power of letting music serve as a vessel for self expression, and, of course, a propensity to want to “stick it to the man.”

So, when the new music of Rivkah Reyes — who played bassist Katie in the 2003 comedy film– came across my inbox, I immediately set up an interview. After all, when else would I get the chance to tell a School of Rock star that my dog’s name is quite literally Dewey Finn?

What I didn’t anticipate, though, was the circumstances we’d find ourselves in. Earlier that day, I’d experienced a family loss. And as is often the case with grief, I found myself in a strange haze of feeling like I needed to remind myself that the world still existed, that things were still moving even if it felt like time had seemingly paused.

As it turns out, Reyes, who knows the struggles of grief firsthand, was just the right person to interview on such a day. Over the course of about an hour, I found myself chatting with her about everything from a mutual love of Olivia Rodrigo to how Coney Island shaped her latest single, and, on a more vulnerable level, how sneakily grief can arise.

“I am a very compulsive, impulsive person,” she says out the gate, when asked about how her approach to relationships shaped the lyrics behind her latest single, “Debt Collector.” “I have a past of addiction, and something that a lot of people who struggle with addiction, whether that’s to substances, or food, or relationships, or whatever it is, this thing of craving instant gratification. That’s why I live in New York. I can walk two feet from my house and get a single serve Midol, a Red Bull and Cheez-Its, all in one fell swoop. Whereas, in other cities I’ve lived in, I’d have to map out when to leave and and decide, should I take a car? Do I take the bus? I love instant gratification, and I find that with dating apps, with social media, with everything being attached to the technology that we use, there’s a lot of instant gratification. We see a lot of people moving really fast in relationships. I’m guilty of that. I cannot shake that. And being gay, it’s harder. The relationship that ‘Debt Collector’ is inspired by was one of those like pretty quick burn lesbian relationships that went from being friends, to fucking, to we were [practically] married.”

She’s open about how even though she’s made great strides in recovery through therapy, she still struggles with an “all or nothing” mentality, which ultimately caused the breakdown of the relationship with her partner that inspired the single.

Well, that, and the fact that both she and her partner lost their mothers over the course of one summer.

The result was a moment of emotional whiplash that found Reyes without her mother, newly single (after being broken up with over text on the day that she and her partner had planned to see Lorde at Madison Square Garden, a concert they still attended together), and buried deep in a state of grief in the aftermath.

“​​I kind of walked around the city, Coney Island, in another state of grief,” she says. “I wrote this notes app thing that said, ‘My higher power is us making out. My higher power is the look on your face when I come back.’ Just putting all of my faith and hope in this thing that just didn’t happen. I’m just getting my heart torn out. Oh, it was bad. It was bad, but then it led to a string of other really fun and like equally gut wrenching situationships that inspired all of the songs on the album. So that’s pretty cool, I guess. We got some good lyrics and poetry out of it and inspiration out of it. I always say I write what I know and what I knew when I was writing this album was a lot of pain and a lot of heartbreak and a lot of just confusion and multiple different characters kind of fumbling the shit out of me.”

But with time, she found peace.

“It didn’t even really sink in for me until around a year after she passed that I’m gonna have to live the rest of my life without her. I had this like heaving sob in therapy for the first time, and ever since then, the last couple months, I’ve been so comfortable with it. I’ve been so close to the grief, and yeah, there are moments where I forget she’s gone, and then I’m like, ‘Oh right, totally.’ And there’ll be moments where things remind me of her, and I’m out on a random Tuesday, and it just hits, and I’m sobbing on the L train. But my mom was always a huge advocate of my music career, of my multiple artistic venues, and was my number one fan no matter what. And so [in recording this EP] she was very much in the studio with me spiritually. I could feel her.”

And there on the other end laid her newest work, Fan Favorite, which is slated to release on November 6, which aside from “Debt Collector” includes other singles “Menace” and “Miss Congeniality,” out now. The EP has a grungy, vulnerable tone, moving from tongue-in-cheek “Sapphic Doomcore Situationship Bangers” (Reyes’ exact description) to raw, heart-on-sleeve ballads. The songs feel reminiscent of artists like Olivia Rodrigo or Courtney Love, who Reyes cites as some of her inspirations, while also maintaining the unique perspective of someone who’s grown up juggling multiple sides of the entertainment industry.

“Nostalgic melancholia is really important to me. I love nostalgia. I love being sad. I love to write while I’m sad on an airplane. It’s where some of my best lyrics have come. Like all of ‘Miss Congeniality’ was written on an airplane trip, where I was like going through another situationship breakup and being really sad about not being chosen. And I was watching the movie Miss Congeniality and I was just like, “Damn! Like she’s so real for that!”

But let’s go back to the “Sapphic Doomcore Situationship Bangers” label. I’ve heard some creative descriptions of an artist’s sound, but that one takes the cake. When asked why she’d label her sound so specifically, her answer is introspective.

“I think being a queer artist, we’re often forced into a box from a young age. I am a girly girl, but I was forced to dress like one growing up, and on my days off, I dress like a teenage boy. I feel like too a lot of artists today are kind of all making the same stuff. If I’m being so fucking for real, a lot of the stuff that I like scroll past on TikTok sounds like the same shit I heard yesterday from some other person, and you know they all have this stamp of like Y2K girly pop or emo pop or whatever. And while those things are kind of in the stew of what makes my music mine, I wanted there to be a hyper specific label, so that I can not only separate myself from other artists, but also point the people that are looking for Sapphic Doomcore Situationship Bangers to me, you know? Because I’m also looking for Sapphic Doomcore Situationship Bangers.”

But aside from hyper specific genre labels, Reyes is also looking for authenticity. After musing about how fleeting TikTok fame can be (“I care more about legacy and longevity than I do virality”), lamenting about the ever growing issue of AI in the music industry (“I don’t let men or computers write for me”), we find ourselves circling back to the heart of Reyes as an artist.

Despite spending almost her entire life in some kind of spotlight, be it on screen, on stage, or behind a mic, Rivkah Reyes is still figuring out how to be herself in public, and doing it more honestly than ever. While she may describe this EP and new era of music as a “reintroduction,” in many ways, it actually feels like a presentation of what’s always been, just maybe now a bit more confidently.

“Music is so impactful to me that I can definitely associate my feelings towards a person that hurt me or that I hurt to a song, and then I can ruin that song for myself. Like ‘Supercut’ by Lorde, I can’t do it anymore. I can never listen to that song again without thinking about the girl who broke up with me on the day of the Lorde concert, the ‘debt collector’ herself. I think that songs are very powerful, and I hope that my songs are powerful to not just me and not just my exes, but other people who can latch on and feel something about it. The same way that Night Shift and Jeff Buckley and Portishead made me feel when I first heard them for the first time.”

And maybe that’s what makes Reyes’ music feel like such a fitting connection to the things that drew people to School of Rock all those years ago. Music has a funny way of meeting us exactly where we are. Be it as a nine year old discovering the joy of rebellion for the first time, walking through grief on a Tuesday afternoon, or trying to make sense of a heartbreak that we thought we had moved on from. If Fan Favorite is anything to go by, Reyes is making music for all of those moments and then some, and that’s reason enough to find out where it lands for you.

Fan Favorite is out November 6.