Finding Emma

There are songs that mend your heart. There are songs that break it. And then there are Emma's songs. The ones that don’t try to do either. They just let your heart sit exactly where it is, and look at it with a kind of clarity that sometimes feels like a small miracle. Which is saying something, because I am not a calm listener. I am the dramatic one. The broken one. The one with the permanently aching heart, always bleeding, always feeling like there’s a neat little hole in the middle of my chest. And suddenly there was music in my life that named that feeling so precisely, so honestly, that I couldn’t help but feel seen. Immediately.

I found Emma late. So late that it almost feels unfair. And I didn’t even find her directly.

I found her through Chelsea Wolfe. Anhedonia. Released in 2021. Thrown at me by the internet during one of those research spirals where you don’t so much look for music as fall into it by accident.

Chelsea Wolfe is one of those artists everyone seems to have a thing with. You hear her name often enough to assume you should, too. I didn’t. She just never landed in my world. I didn’t dislike her. I just didn’t feel the pull. She belonged to other people. And that felt fine.

Still, I didn’t go with Chelsea. Not yet. I took the safer option. I picked the other name on the track. Emma Ruth Rundle. I went through her discography, picked the album cover that spoke to me without asking why, and pressed play on Marked for Death from 2016.

And just to get this out of the way early: this is not going to be an album review. There’s no point pretending otherwise. I can’t break these songs down, analyse them neatly, or tell you what they do. That’s not how this music works for me.

I started with Marked for Death. With the title track. I listened to the album in one sitting and then kept it running. Again and again and again. I didn’t really stop. It became a constant companion. During life, really—work, writing, household chores, walks, grocery shopping. There was very little I didn’t do with this album in my headphones. Sometimes it soothed me. Sometimes, when I was already raw around the edges, it cracked me open a bit further.

Like Anhedonia before it, there were certain lines in certain songs that stood out immediately. Lines that seemed to speak to me with uncomfortable precision. And yes, while I love this album as a whole—I always listen to it start to finish, no skips—there are songs I keep coming back to. Songs that lodged themselves deeper.

Protection is one of them.

Musically, it’s deceptively simple. Insistent drumming, fuzzy guitar chords, distortion creeping in between the verses. Emma’s voice moves from soft and crooning to almost angry, never caring too much about being perfectly on pitch. She reaches for the high notes and lets them trail off, fragile and exposed. I love the sludgy weight of it. The way it presses down without overwhelming.

It feels like a song about being born slightly wrong, and what happens when you carry that knowledge for too long.

Look through me now, see violence replaces the light.

Everything about its delivery is stripped back. Soft, slow bass. A fuzzy guitar picking out a melody. Fingers scraping strings. Emma’s voice low and sullen at first, growing stronger and more pleading at just the right moments. The drums barely hold the song together, like a heartbeat doing the minimum required to keep going.

There’s tension here, stretching steadily without ever breaking. It expands and expands, and just when you expect release, it pulls back. There’s no catharsis. Just resignation.

And then there’s Furious Angel.

That one hurts. In more than one way.

Again, it’s stripped down to the essentials. Cleaner guitars this time, less distortion, subtle synths humming underneath. Emma’s voice is calmer here. More grounded. She doesn’t dramatise anything. She just states it. Clearly.

Let's move on to the last track of the album, Real Big Sky.

The guitars are heavily distorted, murky, rattling so violently they almost feel physical. The recording sounds raw, nearly like a demo. And the lyrics—again—are painfully honest.

There’s a line in Real Big Sky about keeping the light on. About staying, even when someone can’t. I didn’t do that. I left early. I chose distance. Not out of indifference, but fear.

The death of a loved one is something entirely personal. Something no one ever moves through in quite the same way. This song understands that. It doesn’t intrude. It doesn’t interpret. It holds the moment carefully, without softening it or turning it into something easier to bear.

It could not be more perfect.

Those are my favourites on Marked for Death. But they sit within an album I love as a whole. There are no bad tracks here. No skips. It’s a record I stayed with longer than I expected to. For a while, I was hesitant to move on. I was convinced nothing else would land quite the same way. That Marked for Death had hit a particular frequency and that was that. So I lingered. Longer than necessary.

Eventually, I did move on. And it turned out that fear was utterly unfounded.

On Dark Horses (2018) revealed itself quickly as another keeper. It’s different. Less raw. Less inward-facing. There’s more movement here, more structure, a slight lean towards post-rock. Not an album I loved less—just one that spoke to a different moment.

Sing a song, a verse unhinged, passed down from our mother
Take a breath and make it count and learn to sing another
Try 'cause we need to and just laugh the life of hell right out of here
No one else can see him
The shape that makes you fall on fallow ground
So let your heart die in the springtime that surrounds you
It's the darkhorse we give legs to, no one else can ride
In the wake of strange beginnings, we can still stand high

This is a song to put on when done crying. When it’s time to get up again and face the world. And I take solace in the fact that I am not doing it alone. The world-facing. That somewhere out there are sisters in spirit, handing me music like this. Songs that don’t pretend things are easy, but still insist on standing up again.

Races follows a similar pattern, circling themes of addiction and repetition. The endless loop of resolve and relapse. While it’s rooted in Emma’s own experiences of addiction, it’s easy to recognise the shape of it in other kinds of dependency—the promises made at night, broken by morning.

Another song I keep coming back to is Light Song.

The deep male backing vocals alone give it a different weight. It’s as close to a love song as you’re likely to get with Emma Ruth Rundle, though she still keeps it in dark, romantic waters.

This one is simply good to have on. Something that sits quietly in the background and doesn’t ask for more than that. It simply stays pleasant company.

After On Dark Horses, I grew bolder. I went back to Emma’s debut solo album, Some Heavy Ocean (2014).

There are more ambient textures here, a more folk-leaning feel. Emma’s voice is part of the orchestration rather than its centre. It doesn’t demand attention in the same way. Compared to the later albums, Some Heavy Ocean feels easier to live with. The songs are shorter, almost like lullabies or small interludes in your day. They’re still personal, but less bleak. More gentle.

I lay back in salt

Please forgive my name

I won’t speak at all

Just to sing again.

Living With the Black Dog, on the other hand, turns dense and raw again. Heavy distortion. Constant humming. Vibration that creeps under your skin. You can almost see the strings shaking.

Depression. The black dog.

It isn’t dressed up here.

It just exists, loudly.

From there, I moved on to May Our Chambers Be Full, the collaboration Emma released with Louisiana-based sludge metal band Thou. It’s completely different again, but surprisingly easy to fall into. I took to it immediately and still return to it often. That said, it feels like a record that deserves its own space. It isn’t Emma in isolation. Not quite Emma in her pure form. I’ll come back to it another time.

And then.

Then it happened again.

I put on Engine of Hell.

The first piano notes of Return came through my headphones, and I had to sit down. Literally. I stopped what I was doing and sat there, listening properly, because it was immediately clear that this was going to be something else.

Marked for Death showed Emma in a very raw, stripped-back and vulnerable way.

But Engine of Hell? Whole other level.

It’s just Emma and a piano. No orchestration whatsoever.

And the first time she hit the chorus of Return, I was shattered to pieces.

I don’t want to explain why this one is special. There is no need.

Suffice it to say, it feels like someone else sat down with me and listened to what my heart was crying out at night. Took the tears. Distilled them. Put them into this song.

And I cannot listen to it without crying. I just can’t.

There isn’t a single song on Engine of Hell I don’t absolutely adore. Not one. But in the interest of keeping this short and snappy (hah!) I’m not going to go through every track and explain why it’s fantastic. Just trust me. They all are. Every. Single. One. In their own way.

So. That was long, huh?

 I know. Thanks for staying.

I did ask myself—what is this, really? What am I doing here?

For a while, this was just notes. Things I wrote down without overthinking while listening, because I’d been putting off writing anything at all for weeks. It felt too big. Too close. Too precious to touch. And yet—this is what I do. I write about the things that move me.

I think I hesitated because I was afraid I wouldn’t do it justice. That I’d sound like another fangirl. Another overdramatic person yelling "yes, that’s so me". I didn’t want that. But then again—why the hell not.

I’ve made this mistake before. Thinking that because music hits a particular frequency in me, it has to be special to me. Special for me. That there’s a calling in it. A bond. Something singular and private. And I’ve had to learn, the hard way, that this isn’t how music works.

Music is meant to resonate in the plural. Some with many, some with fewer. Me finding myself in it doesn’t make it mine. It just makes it honest.

So this time, I’m trying to do it differently. I am not putting Emma on a pedestal. I am not trying to do her justice by finding the perfect words. I am not building cathedrals in her name, treating her as something holy that is mine alone to tend.

I’m just sharing the music.

Emma Ruth Rundle offers honesty. Raw emotion. Delivered pure. Without pretence. Without drama. Without antics. There is no agenda here. You don’t have to heal. You don’t have to grow. You don’t have to move on. You can do whatever you want to do with your feelings.

But listening to these songs gives you the quiet reassurance that this, too, will pass. The ripples will fade. They always do. Others have been here before, and they have made art out of it.

And so will you.