It was recorded live, its instrumentation entirely acoustic. If that album’s brilliance was at times dimmed by sonic excess, Engine of Hell is crystallized by its austerity. Her rich, smoky alto simmered in moments of bitter reflection and warped into a sneering falsetto when the pain flowed freely. Collaborating with southern Louisiana sludge band Thou on 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full, Rundle held her own. She reincorporated her beloved reverb and death-march drum lines into 2016’s Marked for Death and 2018’s On Dark Horses, but these churning undercurrents were no match for her vocals. On 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, she peeked out from the melancholic morass that characterized her contributions to the downcast post-rock of Marriages and Red Sparowes. Rundle’s power has grown with each new solo album. It’s unsettling to hear her peel back the defense mechanisms she’s often placed between herself and the trauma embedded in her source material, but it’s hard to look away. Stripped of drums and effects, the album is emphatically intimate. Follow her voice through the night into a sprawling cemetery where a new monster lurks behind each tombstone: a black dog here, a medusa there, a nightmarish whisper-scream further down the row.Įngine of Hell’s setting is no less bleak, but now Rundle stands alone among the mausoleums, digging up skeletons buried deep in her psychogeography. The clouds gather as you listen, and before long, darkness has fallen. Drop a needle on one of her records and imagine her shuffling down an otherwise sunny street beneath her own personal raincloud, shivering in an oversized trench coat. Emma Ruth Rundle lives on a gloomy planet.