EMA - Exile in the Outer Ring (LP)

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After the success of 2011'€™s Past Life Martyred Saints and 2014'€™s prophetic The Future'€™s Void, EMA retreated to a basement in Portland, Oregon - a generic apartment complex in a non-trendy neighbourhood, with beige carpeting and cheap slat blinds. Now, she returns, with a portrait of The Outer Ring: A pitch-black world of dark night highways, American flags hung over basement windows, jails and revival meetings and casinos and rage. In a year dominated by white working-class alienation and anger, EMA - a Midwesterner who never lost her thousand-yard stare - has delivered an album that renders Middle American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy.

The album is a return to EMA'€™s roots in the noise-folk outfit Gowns, whose 2007 album Red State prefigured many of Exile'€™s core themes, along with its mix of stripped-back folk. The album is unique in its mingling of gender politics with American working-class anxiety. The voices we hear in these songs - druggy, surly societal outcasts; Byronic nihilists bringing down fire - speak to a kind of rebellion that'€™s typically reserved for men, and the archetype of the "€œdirtbag teenage boy"€ dominates the album. Yet EMA claims some of that same dirtbag alienation for women - "a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole,"€ as EMA puts it  and uses it to interrogate both her own vulnerability and how male violence shapes the world.

The result is a deeply personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form.

This limited edition LP is pressed on red vinyl, and is only available through independent shops such as ourselves.