Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou premiere the second single »The Valley« taken from the collaboration album, »May Our Chambers Be Full«

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou premiere the second single »The Valley« taken from the upcoming collaboration album, »May Our Chambers Be Full«, set to release on October 30th, 2020 via Sacred Bones Records.

Thou guitarist Andy Gibbs on the new track: “Fragile yet powerful; sad but fearless. It’s the feeling you get when you listen to a lot of Emma’s music.”

Emma Ruth Rundle comments: “The Valley is a place. A landscape that lacks vistas and perspectives. An analogy for unrelenting, crushing mental illness, physical pain, addiction and the isolation that can arise as a result of these diseases. There is a choice one must make once initiated into The Valley’s fold; to press on living where no hope will ever show itself or to dissolve into its bleak grayness. On the journey, remains of those who came before us and succumbed are visible. Instead of hope, we turn to anger and defiance for fuel and with those we fortify ourselves. The ending doesn’t resolve, but successful escape from The Valley is unlikely.”

Tracklisting:
01. Killing Floor
02. Monolith
03. Out Of Existence
04. Ancestral Recall
05. Magickal Cost
06. Into Being
07. The Valley

From Sacred Bones Records:

Stemming out of an offer from Roadburn Festival organizer Walter Hoeijmakers, mutual acquaintances, and a shared love of each other’s output, »May Our Chambers Be Full« is the first recorded document of collaboration between Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou. While their solo material seems on its face to be quite disparate, both groups have spent their respective careers lurking at the outer boundaries of the heavy metal scene, the artists having more in common with DIY punk and its spiritual successor, grunge.

»May Our Chambers Be Full« straddles a similar, very fine line both musically and thematically. While Emma Ruth Rundle’s standard fare is a blend of post-rock-infused folk music, and Thou is typically known for its downtuned, doomy sludge, the conjoining of the two artists has created a record more in the vein of the early ’90s Seattle sound and later ’90s episodes of Alternative Nation, while still retaining much of the artists’ core identities. Likewise, the lyrical content of the album is a marriage of mental trauma, existential crises, and the ecstatic tradition of the expressionist dance movement. “Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.” Melodic, melancholic, heavy, visceral.

The visual art accompanying this work was created in collaboration with preeminent New Orleans photographer Craig Mulcahy. The faceless, genderless models are meant to emphasize this pervasive state of ambiguity and emotional vacillation, the images falling somewhere between modern high fashion and classical Renaissance.

Emma Ruth Rundle appears courtesy of Sargent House.

Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well