EMA - Exile in the Outer Ring

The Quietus

Late last year, during the interregnum between Donald Trump’s election and his accession to the White House, my partner and I travelled throughout the United States. As we drove between the liberal, artsy oases of the West Texas desert towards Santa Fe, New Mexico (another liberal, artsy oasis), we rode through a long stretch of oil country. The highways were terrifying in their quotidian bleakness: billboards on either sides advertised the importance of keeping Naltrexone in the house in case a loved one overdosed on opioids, or the services of personal-injury lawyers if you were involved in a crash with one of the oil trucks that domineer the highways here. Stretches of the highway were dedicated to victims of drink-driving. A ranch we passed featured a rifle slung underneath its entry archway and the motto “We don’t call 911”. Later, I looked up how the counties along this desolate stretch voted in the election: unsurprisingly, they all swung hard to Trump.

Erika M Anderson might have been born in South Dakota rather than New Mexico, but her music has long captured the bleakness of places like this - her earlier project Gowns recorded an album titled Red State, after all. On Exile In The Outer Ring, she moves from merely capturing this bleakness to making a broader point: that the world of American flags draped over basement windows, of getting fucked up in parking lots, of trucks fitted with court-mandated breathalysers, is now - thanks to the electoral quirks that delivered the presidency to Trump - the most salient part of the United States. The ‘outer ring’ of the title describes the physical spaces where this bleakness flourishes: the rings of strip malls and parking lots around liberal cities, where economic refugees from city gentrification and the hollowing-out of the conservative countryside meet and mix. It’s the kind of place where Trump voters rub shoulders with poor queers and immigrants, where people of all hues and persuasions get high and fuck and fight, where the victims of late capitalism try their utmost to get by.

Anderson walks a fine line on Exile In The Outer Ring: she doesn’t romanticise the material conditions or revolutionary potential of this space, nor does she pity the people who inhabit it. Instead, her vision is gimlet-eyed: “We got no meaning / no gleaming, no proof / we’re arbitrary / we’re temporary,” she sings on ‘I Wanna Destroy’. It’s impossible to listen to that song without thinking of the destructive id in the American mass psyche that would rather elect an unpredictable potential tyrant to the White House than do the right and expected thing and elect the establishment-approved, born-to-rule candidate. That same perspicacity turns out to be eerily prophetic in ‘Aryan Nation’, a song recorded and released prior to the recent neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia: she sings of groups of men “Throwing down with the least provocation / with that vintage steel / from your dad’s generation”. The song erases a simple us-vs-Nazis binary, however: she addresses the song’s listener, a “refugee from the Aryan nation” and lets you know “you’re still them within”.

Musically, this is Anderson at her most assured: she has synthesised her various musical interests and influences - noise music, metal, grunge, folk and country - into an entirely idiosyncratic musical lexicon. Drumbeats echo with cavernous reverb that recalls Ministry and Nine Inch Nails at their grimy 90s best; caterwauling sheets of guitar and synthesiser feedback wash over her vocals on ‘Fire Water Air LSD’ and ‘Breathalyser’. The coherence of Exile In The Outer Ring is a sharp departure from Anderson’s previous album, The Future’s Void, which occasionally felt as though it were bouncing between genre exercises, and places Exile as the spiritual successor to her solo debut, the stupendously forceful and moving Past Life Martyred Saints.

Exile In The Outer Ring isn’t here to titillate its listeners with poverty porn or to function as a paean to the indomitable spirit of the people who inhabit these spaces. Instead, as the closing, spoken-word track ‘Where the Darkness Began’ makes plain, it asks for introspection, for each of us to acknowledge our role in the creation and maintenance of this mundane dystopia. “It’s hard to say where the darkness began,” Anderson says. “It seems to be closing in from around the edges, but it’s possible that it’s coming from inside you.”

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Drowned In Sound 90

But the problem with that viewpoint – and what EMA wants to tell us, I swear – is that this rage in Exile In The Outer Ring, that seeps out from scrubbed-clean filth like scalding water from a 20-yr old industrial dishwater, is not just hers. Even her previous album – the hazy dystopian swan song to her digital identity, The Future’s Void - spoke to anyone who’s ever felt submerged by the internet. Here, that displacement lurches into the real world: in parking lots, outside casinos, inside bedrooms, under the harsh rays of the sun, among trash-talking dudes. And while EMA still swirls blasted riffs around her and slams us back with aftershock drums, this time she stands visibly before us, blueprints and implements of destruction in clear sight.

First things first, though – before we delve into the girls and the boys and the kids from the void (i.e. other artists in other beige basements), let’s first admire the structure of this outer ring. At the fringes, you have the panoramic shots of disillusion: '7 Years' rues the past in a silvery pool of diffracted light, while 'Always Bleeds' casts shade over the future as a golden drone crawls across the sky, obscuring whole states in a Mogwai-paced gleam. (EMA has swapped the symbolic positions of light and dark in Exile: sunlight reveals and destroys, while shadows offer solace and protection.) As we approach the centre, the violent and promiscuous impulses usually reserved for men bubble into view, reclaimed firmly in terms that Trent Reznor only wishes he could convey again. Caught undertow in this wreckage, you might mistake such a layout for entropy; step back, however, and the boarders and subdivisions wrought by EMA’s hand become clear.

Speaking of confidence – well, hot damn. Zoom back to the center a minute. I can and have listened to 'Down and Out' half a dozen times in a row – and why? Why? What magnetism is this, downcast and deadly like the Kills, but fizzled and fractured like frayed wires, with a line as old as the blues itself: “everyone thinks you’re worthless when you’re down and out”? But the real feat – both here and in the deliriously licentious, Knife-twisted 'Fire Water Air LSD' that follows – is how EMA strides through self-destruction without shame. That’s because, as she explains in torch song 'Blood and Chalk', her goals can’t be bound by her public, physical form. "I know the rage that’s in me / but I’m just what you made me." Self-annihilation, then, seems logical and necessary. (Man, doncha just love when you can tease abstract strands of logic from a pop culture artefact? I suspect EMA intended this.)

This leads us to the aforementioned boy-vs-girl tension. Throughout Exile - indeed, even more than the suburban imagery, which after a while vanishes on the horizon – EMA usurps the role of violent avenger normally ascribed to angry white males. In industrial hymn 'I Wanna Destroy' she vows to validate the existence of middle-class kids through annihilation; '33 Nihilistic and Female' slams a chrome- plated mallet in the face of anyone who might deny that she’s capable of such destruction. And in another succinct and Kills-esque crawler 'Aryan Nation', she draws a fine line between her mission and the past glories of the patriarchy: "tell me stories of famous men / I can’t see myself in them".

But in the skeletal 'Receive Love', we see the real and human difference between EMA and ordinary dudes with rage – she’s torn between both sides. "I’m not always scared about the man / just that sometimes it’s hard to trust in them.” Of course, we’ve seen the inside of Anderson before (even on this album – see the self-effacing torch song of 'Blood and Chalk', where EMA erases her physical form), but choked empathy like this takes a ton of guts to admit.

That scabbed, throat-rubbed-raw vulnerability cinches Exile for me, more than the whole back-to-the-‘burbs conceit. What EMA aims to achieve here, after all, extends beyond the outer ring: she’s not the only one who can wreck destruction upon the coddled masses and men that have never known oppression or oblivion. Rise, kids of the void – follow the path of your new cult leader.

Pitchfork 80

Erika M. Anderson’s third solo album is a surreal and powerful story about political alienation. Her character-driven songs of noise, folk, and pop music thrum with rage and fear.