Listen to Emma, the brand new single from SHHE
Emma, the fourth single to be taken from SHHE's upcoming debut album, "is an unapologetic dance track"
Following on from Eyes Shut, BOY and Saint Cyrus, the latest single to be released by Dundee-based artist and producer SHHE, real name Su Shaw, comes in the form of the stunning Emma, a track which manages to be both eerie and enticing.
The fourth single to be taken from her upcoming eponymous debut album, set for release on 11 October via One Little Indian Records, begins with a drone, swiftly accompanied by Shaw’s woozy, almost otherworldly vocals: ‘Emma, where have you gone? / I’ve been waiting up for you for so long’, she sings before a pulsing guitar line joins the story. Reminiscent in parts of Intro by The xx, at the song’s midpoint it opens up into a throbbing bassline, fully transforming from its understated beginnings.
The Skinny are delighted to share Emma, which you can listen to in the below SoundCloud player (click here if it's not displaying correctly).
“I remember the first time I went to a contemporary dance show,” Shaw tells us. “My friends were performing YAMA by Damien Jalet. It started with this intense white noise, this irregular breathing. It made my whole body tense. But there was a magnetism too, this energy that kept building. The longer I watched, the more I wanted to watch. By the end I was kind of hooked on the anxiety from it. Watching some of those performances started to inform the way I thought about visuals in my own projects and the relationship between music and movement.
“Emma is about a symbiotic relationship,” she continues. “The kind where one gains and the other suffers. There is no mutual benefit. There’s a narrative that runs through the track, a drone which acts as an undercurrent. It makes you feel nauseous and euphoric. At times it’s an uncomfortable listen but I didn’t want to write something that I could hide behind. Emma is an unapologetic dance track.”
Emma is out now; SHHE is released on 11 Oct via One Little Indian Records, available to preorder here; SHHE plays The Glove That Fits, London, 10 Oct