EMA goes to the void on her superb third album

EMA began writing her dark but ultimately hopeful new album, Exile In The Outer Ring, before the presidential election, but it can’t help but feel like a reaction to the Trump era. It even has a song called “Aryan Nation”—“Go back home to below your station / Like a refugee from the Aryan nation”—but Exile In The Outer Ring’s timeliness remains coincidental. Erika M. Anderson was digging into suburban alienation long before it mobilized at the voting booth.

Inspired by what she calls “the outer ring”—“the suburban world of people… pushed out of city centers by stagnating wages and rising expense, forced up against rural communities swallowed by sprawl,” per the album’s press materials—EMA drew upon her childhood in South Dakota and running with what she calls “scumbag boys.” Their perspective drives Exile In The Outer Ring, from the powerlessness of “Down And Out,” to the cycle of violence and poverty in “Aryan Nation,” to the utter hopelessness of “Always Bleeds,” in which EMA almost coos, “We were born defeated / I do not think that this will ever end.”