Cancer Changed ROZES’s Life and Music

For most of her life, Liz McQuiston turned to music to process big emotional moments—when she was being bullied in school, when she fell deeply in live, and when someone she loved was sick. But this time, not her seven instruments, her powerful singing voice, nor her lyrical ability could dim the fear and pain she was facing.

At 32 years old, the musician known as ROZES was a new mom, married to her longtime love, Brendan, and in the midst of a thriving music career that included the hit song “Roses,” which she recorded with the Chainsmokers.

And she was facing a stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis.

The lump didn’t seem ominous at first. “I found it during my pregnancy, but I would often get these benign lumps called fibroadenomas, and I thought that’s what it was because it’s not uncommon for them to grow during pregnancy,” she says. “After I gave birth to my daughter, Maizy, I knew I had to get it checked out. I had an appointment and everything. But I canceled it.”

McQuiston breastfed her daughter for a year, making a deal with herself that if the lump was still there when Maizy had her first birthday, she’d make an appointment to see her doctor. At the end of the year, her doctor took one look at the lump and sent her for diagnostics, which included a mammogram, an ultrasound, and eventually a biopsy. “My mom was with me because I was a nervous wreck, and when they pulled me back to repeat the mammogram, I immediately thought, This isn’t good. This is cancer.”

Initially, McQuiston was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, but with more testing doctors found it had spread to lymph nodes, which escalated the diagnosis to stage 3. “It’s just trauma after trauma when you’re going through those initial stages,” she says. “I felt like somebody took me out of my body, and I was a robot just putting one foot in front of the other, doing test after test. But eventually I felt a lot of guilt that I should have gone sooner to get it checked. I just kept thinking, Am I not going to see my baby grow up? Am I not going to see my husband grow up? Am I not going to grow up?

On Her Terms

On May 3, 2025, McQuiston posted a video on social media, announcing her diagnosis to her thousands of fans and followers. With a bare, tear-stained face and wearing a tie-dye Nirvana T-shirt, McQuiston looked at the camera and said, “I have cancer, breast cancer to be exact. I’m obviously still processing. Right now we know that it is in my lymph—it has spread there. We have a lot of steps ahead of us. Today I am getting an MRI.”

One of the reasons she had such a clear understanding of what she was about to face is because her sister-in-law, Shea Mencel, a two-time breast cancer survivor who was first diagnosed when she was 28 years old, cofounded a nonprofit called We Are Here, which connects patients with support services.

Although McQuiston’s doctors believed her cancer was slow growing, its advanced stage was met with urgency. Before she could begin her treatment plan, which included eight rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation, she wanted to freeze her embryos so she could have a chance at another pregnancy down the road. “I basically had two weeks to do the egg retrieval. We had one shot to get it right,” McQuiston says. “I had that procedure on a Sunday, and I started chemo a few days later. My insurance didn’t cover fertility treatment, but I didn’t have time to even think about it.”

She also prioritized genetic testing, wanting to ensure she wasn’t passing on mutations to her daughter. “It tore me up for weeks until I learned that I don’t have any mutations,” McQuiston says, “especially because I was so young to be getting cancer.”

In June, McQuiston posted on social with another purpose. With her song “Stranger” playing in the background and her blue eyes filled with tears, she cut off one blond ponytail and then the other with scissors. Then her husband gently trimmed her hair until it was short enough to buzz off with an electric razor. “I had the option to cold cap, which basically freezes your scalp when you go to chemo so you can try to keep your hair. But my husband encouraged me to just own it and show that I can get through hard things,” McQuiston says. “I wanted to shave my head before chemo took the choice from me, so that’s what I did.”

As it is for many patients, the four months of chemo was hard on her body, although she knows it could have been worse. She was nauseous and lost her appetite, and she was immediately launched into chemical menopause. “I had hot flashes, and I was uncomfortable in my body,” McQuiston says. “But I got through it, and I even found it in me to work out some days. Looking back, I think, How did I do that?” When she finished her final round of chemo, and MRI indicated that the treatment did its job, but during the mastectomy procedure, surgeons discovered that the cancer was instead broken into tiny pieces. “That was disappointing, but it did show death of some cancer cells in the lymph nodes. They removed four lymph nodes to test them, and they all came back positive for cancer,” McQuiston says. “So I had a second surgery to take out more, and thank goodness we did because they took out all my axillary lymph nodes—about 15 or so—and three had cancer.”