RELEASED 21.6.2011
Two years after her critically acclaimed debut First Love, Emmy The Great is set to release her second album Virtue. Written and recorded under very different circumstances to her first, Virtue began as a series of stories Emmy embarked on after her engagement to an atheist, but took on a very different shape when he left her for the church. Using symbols borrowed from fairy tales and mythology, Emmy added the icons that have replaced them in our modern consciousness – industrial buildings, mushroom clouds, West London’s Trellick Tower. This was Emmy’s personal collection of myths that she fitted to her music – a genre she refers to as digital medieval. She’d noticed that women only make it through the woods in big myths if they keep their virtue and she felt lost in the woods twice while writing the album, first when she got engaged, the second time when the stitches came apart. Producer Gareth Jones (These New Puritans, Depeche Mode and Grizzly Bear) indulged their romanticism, but understood her wish to make the music sound precise, rather than precious. It’s this record, she says, that’s made her feel like a person and that she hopes will speak to others who’ve endured and survived. Dinosaur Sex A Woman, A Woman, A Century Of Sleep Iris Paper Forest (In The Afterglow Of Rapture) Cassandra Creation Sylvia Exit Night / Juliet’s Theme North Trellick Tower