In the summer of ’25, I had an ear-opening experience. In a hifi shop in North London, a couple tests out amps and speakers. They exchange a Sinatra for an Ellington, big band jazz for solo vocalists. Browsing vinyls to the side, I only half-listen to the music, until the very last one they choose. It’s a woman’s voice, surely famous and known to everyone but me. No instruments, no backup, just her in one long held note, fluttering into a quick run, landing with easy precision. And I can hear her. I can hear her like I’ve been deaf and senseless all my life, and now at last I’ve been blessed with a miracle. I can hear every little tremor of the sound, I can hear her lips move to shape it, I can hear her tongue bend behind her teeth.
All of a sudden, it feels like an intrusion to listen. Like the song was just for her, secret, personal, private. At most, meant for somebody who cannot be me. Nobody should be heard so closely, so intimately, on a speaker. People used to believe cameras stole your soul. In that moment, I believed a microphone could do just that.
It’s all I can think of as Emma Ruth Rundle‘s new album These Killing Times washes over me. Every moment in each of her breaths is a moment I’m aware of. The resonance on the guitar strings wobbles and shakes, each microscopic wave as clear as if it’s painted. The sound is graphic; the ‘t’s and ‘p’s sharp, like clicks in your joints, like your ears coming up from underwater. When ‘God’s Picture’ swells into the final plea of the chorus, drums, piano and saxophone all cut in and out and around the voice so clearly, so piercingly. You press ‘play’ and it’s immediately obvious, this is a masterpiece of sound design and sound recording, done by a master of the craft, Sonny Diperri.
It’s an album that demands this nigh-unbearable fidelity. For all the rage and vulnerability it conveys, it also delivers us Emma at her most fearsome, ablaze in righteous anger, clear-eyed and hurting from it. Backed up by a full band, it is her voice that draws me in, draws me close, uncomfortably close, so as to grab me by the hair and chin and whisper straight into my ear. There is an air of seduction, but the seduction is with truths and loss and imminent destruction, her voice is the caress on the sharp of a blade, her voice circles the ragged edge of the world. It’s the voice not of a Circe, but of a doomed Cassandra watching Troy burn as she had prophesied.
We are all watching the end be erratically conducted by those with the money and power to think themselves above it all. It is the thread running through the whole album, this interrogation of authority and oligarchy, how can you let this happen? How can you make this happen?
‘Powerless’ bleakly starts off with “Power corrupting, you had my trust / Empire collapsing, everything dust” and by the time we hear ‘Enough’, the rage has built into a cry of “Do not you have my whole world? / Is not the whole world enough?” as infernal noise breaks through, a cacophony of instruments pushed beyond musicality. There is an unstable quality to the journey of this album, like it can all be wiped away in an instant, and it’s hard not to think of our own human rights, the common freedoms we enjoy today which can be taken away by one executive order. Here too comes a feminist angle, as the female body is broken on ‘Catherine Wheel’, used and discarded on ‘Enough’, allowed only a brief moment to feel on ‘Don’t Delay Heaven’.
Hey man, what will you do?
Such fear is coming for you
I am taken aback by its spiritual dimension. I was raised in the Romanian Orthodox Church with its burning incense and Byzantine chants and small wooden churches covered in painted saints and angels, and it is rare to hear a rock album that takes the depth and paradox of faith seriously, while also pointing a finger to institutions and what they’ve done in the name of. It pulls from the wider Christian lore to showcase the apparent loss of faith, feeling abandoned and betrayed by what you held highest – “Sing “Hallelujah” and free me, my body / What’s it to you?“.
Yet throughout, it maintains a sense of awe. The beautiful church bells on ‘Anvil’ shimmer between guitar and piano, spacious as if refracted by a prism of air. The Phrygian scale lends itself to the Middle Eastern atmosphere of ‘Catherine Wheel’, which reimagines the point of view of the martyred Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the questioning “How can this be the end?” and silent wonder at whether her sacrifice was worth it at all.
Emma returns to words and images repeatedly, like the hammer and the turning wheel. The imagery is palpable: “the milk of human kindness“, “the milk is spit, the milk is kiss“, “of its flesh, of its pith, of its peel“. The wordplay is delicious: “we run light rabid rabbits […] craven habits hammer“, “a phrase” sung so as to sound like “afraid“, “I believe in ever” moving into “if you ever see, ever need me” like ever was a being, a place, a form. Emma’s own manner of singing is vague, letting the words blend into each other, mumbled the way impressionist art is scribbled – keeping but the loosest hold on a rigid form of things.
Absolute dichotomies are rejected. Nothing is just darkness or light, good or bad. The hammer is a weapon and a tool, “one for breaking, one for building something better“. She uses the word “love” very little. When it appears, it’s only a brief ray of sunshine amid the debris and ash of her visions of fire and the end. “My true love […] left in the morning for the war zone” The final time she uses it, it’s twisted. “I have crossed oceans of time / To find you and learn your love“, referencing the distorted destructive love story of Count Dracula and Mina Harker in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation. Meanwhile in ‘Anvil’, she references Gone Girl. For their love of God, saints have allowed themselves to be martyred. Not even love can be always trusted. Like faith, like power, love gets corrupted. It can destroy as much as save.
Many times whilst listening to These Killing Times, I felt afraid. It made me pause and sigh and cry, it made me squirm in my own skin and look around me wildly, what have we done, what’s there left to save, what time is there, what have we done, what have we done, what can we do.
The answer is in the softest piece of the album. ‘Don’t Delay Heaven’ hides its pain beneath gossamer vocals. The instrumentation is sparse, mostly strummed guitar over a steady drumbeat, the piano coming in gently. It is a love song, a dedication, in the middle of which she pleas: “Help me un-belong, help me to un-believe“. Love here comes as an antidote to the poison of the demagogue, the hysteria of the masses. Love frees you from the crowd. Love cleanses the mind from the spell of the patriarch, the nationalist, the tyrant.
And as feeling and hope return (“It runs deeper than you know“), so does the horror of what we’ve been made to ignore. ‘Human Kindness’ is not the lulling cradling of a mother to a child, but the Pacific Ocean building up those monstrous waves that swallow ships whole. The final bridge into an absolutely epic guitar solo put me in mind of the end of Pink Floyd‘s ‘Eclipse’, a similarly everbuilding crescendo that here breaks over into the desperate “I want, I have, I know, I feel / this all to bury human kindness“. All around, there are women singing as if screaming. If ever there was a song to play over a city burning or a heart cracking open, this is it.
Perhaps this is an exorcism. Perhaps this is a prophecy. Where will “the valley of the shadow of the fear of all men” lead? Hard to tell. The only way is through. Or is it, I sense Emma asking.