Emma Ruth Rundle made a conscious choice to reach towards making a hopeful record for the follow up to 2021’s Engine of Hell. Where outside forces tempted her to turn inwards, towards isolation and hopelessness, she instead reached outwards to create a record that acknowledges pain, but offers both community and resilience in response. Although These Killing Times possesses a spirit of defiance, it retains the tenderness and vulnerability that saw her earlier work resonate with so many listeners. These Killing Times is electrifying, emotional, and charged with feminine rage; it is a reactive anthology, bristling, full of life and full of resistance - forged by and for community. It asks many questions - of the roles we play as individuals, or as artists - and closes with this one: what will we live for beyond the valley of the shadow of the fear of all men? A question with no definitive answer as yet, but one that is being asked with increasing urgency - here on this record, and beyond.
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Cinder Well is the musical project of Los Angeles–based songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker. Cinder Well’s new album, A Blooming Body, was recorded at Hen House Studios in Venice Beach, California by Harlan Steinberger, to be released on July 17th.
Cinder Well extracts dark, rich and tender compositions which nod to, but also stray from traditional musical languages. By comparison to the more diaristic tones of previous releases (2015’s self-titled EP, 2018’s The Unconscious Echo, 2020’s No Summer, 2023’s Cadence), A Blooming Body feels like glimpsing scattered vignettes of a whole world rather than a sequential narrative from beginning to end. Through richly textured arrangements, A Blooming Body expands the sonic world of Cinder Well, resulting in a more immersive, visceral and unconventional collection of songs than we’ve heard before. The music on A Blooming Body shimmers with clarity, Cinder Well’s annunciation crystal clear, and yet there are heady depths to the stories told here that plunge fathoms beneath the ethereal, acoustic surface.
On A Blooming Body, Cinder Well creates a sound that is both expansive and cinematic, and the kind of experimentation which lead to her composing the original theme song and score for the hit BBC TV series Small Prophets (written, directed by, and starring Mackenzie Crook alongside Sir Michael Palin). Through endless shifts in perspective, and a sound which knows when to bolster the lyrics, and when to let them speak for themselves, Cinder Well’s music becomes universal on A Blooming Body, laying bare a weight that exists not in guitar tracks or distortion, but the kind we carry with us day to day.
Cinder Well has toured extensively throughout the US and Europe and has shared the stage with artists including Lankum, Pallbearer, Reverend Kristen Michael Hayter, and 40 Watt Sun. Recent festival appearances include Roadburn, Amplifest, Prepare the Ground, and End of the Road. In 2024, Cinder Well performed at NPR’s Tiny Desk, of which Lars Gotrich wrote: “a crimson glow surrounds the dark undercurrent of Cinder Well that only grows brighter as the music goes deeper into the unknown.”
