August 28, 2017

EMA’s New Album Captures the Sound of Looming Chaos

The third offering from singer Erika M. Anderson unspools ominous tales of alienation and anger.

EMA

Exile in the Outer Ring

City Slang

Chromatic PR

Exile in the Outer Ring is the sound of looming chaos. Recorded primarily in what she calls a “shitty apartment” in Portland, Ore., the gripping third album from Erika M. Anderson, aka EMA, drowns deceptively catchy pop melodies in shadowy, delirious vocals, damaged old-school electronics and menacing beats, unspooling ominous tales of alienation and anger. “He wanted me to blow the breathalyzer/Out on his truck cuz he was going somewhere,” she murmurs in one especially eerie interlude, elsewhere repeatedly chanting, “I wanna destroy,” to chilling effect. If Anderson’s dark vignettes—including the timely track “Aryan Nation”—seem attuned to contemporary stresses, lines like “Everyone thinks you’re worthless/When you’re down and out” connect her arresting work to the deepest traditions of the blues.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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