Future Shock: EMA Interviewed

“You’re calling from Manchester, right? That sounds like Manchester to me. Yeah, I can hear a little bit of that. You got that twang on the vowels.” Picture it: just as we’re really getting into it, just as we’re starting to pore over the deeper, darker levels of The Future’s Void, the head-spinning second album by EMA, Skype throws a wobbler and the line goes dead. Portland, Ohio and the drizzly north-west of England wrenched apart on the whim of mere ones and zeroes. A nervous glance at the dictaphone – potential interview gold, lost forever.

Thankfully Erika M. Anderson laughs it off: “Oh yeah, man! I was talking about all this cool, really insightful stuff to myself and you missed it all!” But it’s a misstep that sets us off again at a tangent. The last time Anderson was around these parts, touring debut Past Life Martyred Saints over here three times in a year, she dared chide the locals for their apparent lack of indie heritage, her keynote cover of Violent Femmes’ Add It Up not quite getting the recognition she felt it deserved. “Yeah! People didn’t recognise that as much as I would have expected,” she says. “But I’m from the Midwest, so the Violent Femmes, you just grew up with that. Anyway, I’ve forgiven you.”

It’s a shame her take on that twisted document of male sexual insecurity, reclaimed by a woman from the next generation no less, didn’t get its due. But it’s a sure-fire indicator of her seemingly insatiable hunger for exploration. If parts of her audience hadn’t clocked how little respect she had for sticking to the path, The Future’s Void should erase all doubts, even if during its conception Anderson had few qualms about airing her initial fears via Twitter. “Well of course, yeah,” she says. “It’s your sophomore record. I did tweet a lot about it at first, yeah. I think I tweeted something like ‘Everyone has a way to fuck up their sophomore record.’ And it’s a fine line, you know? A lot of people were like ‘Horns! Horns section! Don’t do it!’ which I thought was really funny. Yeah, I think… how do I explain this? It’s a little bit difficult. You perhaps don’t trust yourself as much the second time around. It’s a challenge in that you can’t be quite as free, perhaps. You find yourself thinking ‘Oh no – people are going to listen to this one!’”

It’s a cliché well-worn – the oh-so difficult second album. If your first is an expectoration of teenage experience, beautifully unburdened by expectation, album number two is all too often over-thought and over-worked. Yet The Future’s Void, from the brute crackle of Satellites to Dead Celebrity – its closing, tender elegy – is a dark triumph, as secure in its vision as we perhaps never dared hope. The end product suggests an entirely untroubled gestation: “Well we can just pretend that that was the case! Mmm. I don’t think I ever necessarily felt secure. But that’s kind of what I like. I like doing things that make me feel a little insecure, because I think that’s when you’re bumping up against boundaries, that’s when you’re bumping up against things that are new. You’re asking yourself if you can even do this. Will it work? Is this cool? Those are good questions. So whenever you come across those, it just means that you have to keep going in that direction.”

"I really see this one as a dark sequel in a trilogy. It’s a little bit Empire Strikes Back" – Erika M Anderson

That title speaks of resignation and defeat but there’s no hint of that within. It’s switched-on, clued-up, and defiantly alive. De rigueur slacker cynicism? Not on the menu. “Well the title’s interesting in that there are a number of different ways in which it can be taken,” says Anderson. “And I guess it does have this kind of sinister, nihilistic, dystopian vibe to it but it’s also just a nod towards this kind of cyberpunk fiction that I was reading; 80s sci-fi movies I was watching. I imagined that title being spray-painted on a wall by some future punks on some 80s movie set in 2014. I think it also has this kind of West Coast stoner vibe. There’s a lot of humour in what I do – it’s almost satirical. It’s all about playing with genre. The song So Blonde is a satire on grunge, a loving satire on a typical grunge song.”

The opening bar with that descending tom roll and those fat major chords, they could only have come from that scene. “Oh yeah! Totally. You know, grunge is coming back with some younger fans and I’m playing with that. The lyrics, they’re kind of ambivalent about the protagonists of grunge. It’s not lionising those people. It’s trying to look back with a slightly more critical eye. But also, I’ve always just wanted to try that grunge scream. So, yeah, that one can be enjoyed on multiple levels.” She considers for a moment. “Ha! Hopefully!”

As daring as its disdain for genre is the album’s uncompromising running order, a sequence that sees it open at volume and close on a whisper. Its three deathly quiet moments (100 Years, Solace, Dead Celebrity) all come at the end. The delicate 100 Years is Anderson’s greatest departure to date, a barely supported vocal that’s more madrigal than pop song, arranged on what sounds like an almost medieval scale. “Yeah, I love that scale. I believe it’s the Dorian mode, which is a super-British Isles thing and it’s one of my favourite scales. I could write in that all day. The record had this really upfront political punk song on it at one point and I just thought we needed some space. The whole album was very dense with electronics at that point and so I wanted that space.”

There’s a quality to Anderson’s lyrics that’s hard to pinpoint. There’s little in the way of narrative or even viewpoint at times. But there’s an uncluttered elegance to her written form. The line 'Disassociation is the modern disease' is as close as she gets in song to standing alongside the claims of the album title. “Yeah, maybe,” she says. “I think that was about me having these really ambivalent feelings about being even a moderate success in the internet age, where all of a sudden you feel like your likeness and your words are being replicated everywhere. I feel like it’s really easy to… you can end up feeling disconnected from this person who is…you. I found that really difficult and I just really needed to get those feelings off my chest. Especially that song you mention (3Jane). I needed to be able to write that song, those words, to allow me to write anything else.”

We should be wary of attaching labels too broad to works so complex, art deserving of deeper consideration. But even at this stage, The Future’s Void stands as a sharp re-modelling; more thoughtful, multi-layered and, crucially, more of a musician’s album. With much of her initial coverage keen to capture the ‘character,’ and paint her as a gobby scenester, it’s Anderson’s emerging musicianship (she’s a genuinely gifted singer into the bargain – oddly, rarely mentioned) that should be grabbing the headlines. Even so, with the album complete, is she still trying to fully understand it herself? “Yeah. That’s interesting. This record is a little more guarded in some ways,” she explains. “This time I had to set up boundaries for myself. And yeah, it is a little bit more musical. I’m trying more musical things. Will I stay like that? I don’t know. I would like to be able to combine the musicality of this record and the freedom of the first record. Plus, this record is about building my palette and building skills. I really see this one as a dark sequel in a trilogy. It’s a little bit Empire Strikes Back, you know? I’m figuring out what I like. I definitely didn’t want to just make the first record again. That would have been really false. I now need to figure out just what it is that I love and be able to go forward and just be who I am. It’s hard to come back from a record like Past Life Martyred Saints and please everybody, and have it be true.”

In a world where young musicians ritually announce themselves and their genius with a self-belief bordering on psychosis, a musician like Erika M. Anderson, still figuring out her path, and doing it not just in conversation but through her art, is a rare thrill. You wonder what might come next. Her future seems far from empty, rather it seems limitless. “Oh yeah. Expect pivots,” she says by way of confirmation. “Expect the next record to be different. Some people talk about it as evolution but it’s also about keeping myself engaged, you know? I have to look at other people, see what else I can learn. Do I think that that is what I want to do forever? No. I did say to myself on this one, Let’s try and write a pop song – verse-chorus-verse. See how that works. See how it works, perhaps, for old friends in the Midwest who kind of liked Past Life Martyred Saints but who” – she pauses – “also didn’t totally get it... So I gave it a go. What’s a bridge? Let’s check that out. Let’s do the drop-out. Whatever. But you know, ultimately it comes back to what moves me. Not what moves records. So yeah, expect turns. Expect different – oh, I don’t know!” She laughs, seemingly amused by the ridiculousness of her own self-critique. Then all at once she seems to settle on how to best summarise the road ahead: “Don’t expect anything.”