EMMA RUTH RUNDLE - These Killing Times

Over the past few years, Emma Ruth Rundle has taken the most disparate paths, first teaming up with the excellent Thou for the sludge experience of “May Our Chambers Be Full” and then exploring exclusively acoustic, piano-driven territory (“Engine Of Hell” and “Music From The Bella Vista”). In between, there's a rather underrated work like “EG2: Dowsing Voice”, caught between psych-folk experimentation and American primitivism.
Now, with “These Killing Times”, the long journey has come full circle, and she returns to embrace a tried-and-tested formula, without giving up originality and a compositional boldness of real substance.

The singles that preceded the album leave no doubt about its qualities: “Powerless” highlights a dualism that's both musical and conceptual (“let me lie here with this hammer in my hand, one for breaking one for building something better”), alternating stillness with an electric storm bordering on post-metal. “Enough”, on the other hand, follows an apparently more linear path, until its sharp acoustic textures explode into a noisy break where every instrument (including a muffled saxophone) writhes into chaos.
Eight tracks in all, but each one has something important to say. “Anvil” grows in intensity until it spills over into drama, while “Catherine Wheel” and “Don't Delay Heaven” take us back into a semi-acoustic dimension able to gently caress us while at the same time twisting a knife into our soul.

“These Killing Times” keeps renewing itself through a delicate fragility that can turn into beauty, energy and power: an album to breathe with and to come to terms with the ugliness of everyday life, amid piano notes, powerful (but never overbearing) guitars and a voice that remains, as ever, soft and reassuring.
If the recent return of Chelsea Wolfe proved rewarding even in its lighter, more crystalline moments, this record works almost in reverse, unveiling a series of songs that are never quite settled, unstable, deep and even dirty (the doom-laden opener “Human Kindness”). The result pushes well beyond the peaks already reached by the American musician (think of the remarkable “On Dark Horses” from 2018), taking Emma Ruth Rundle into a living, vibrant dimension where emotions simmer and send a shiver down the spine.

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18/09/2026