Emmy The Great Album Details

Emmy The Great may acquire a new nickname when their debut album emerges early next year: Emmy The Grim.

The folky collective, led by singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss, recently cranked out the main bulk of their as-yet-untitled record up in Colne, Lancashire, and found it quite an eye-opener.

“It was a life changing experience, I didn’t realise it was so cold and wet up north,” announces the Hong Kong-born Moss. “I’ve changed, I’ve actually become grim, opening the door every day and thinking ‘ah, it’s absolutely pissing it down with rain’. It was amazing, I was in a skinhead fight within about ten minutes of getting up there - they took us to this local pub and these skinheads started headbutting each other. So it’s not a very optimistic album, it’s quite serious.”

Moss and co journeyed to England’s wintry North - as opposed to the currently balmy South, East and West - to work with the excellent Earlies. The Anglo-American folk-rockers would seem a perfect fit as producers of ETG’s eagerly-awaited longplayer but it wasn’t quite the seamless coming together you might imagine. Ms Moss is pleasingly up-front about how the colab came about.

“All the studios in the entire country had been booked, except for the Earlies’ studio,” she laughs. “We were on tour in Manchester and I was like, ‘we’ve got to make this record’, and we happened to go past their studio, so we went in and had a ten-minute conversation and thought, ‘we’re going to have a really good time with these guys.’ It was a happy coincidence because they were the most suitable people for what we wanted to do.”

Moss - nickname Embot - was actually intent on doing a “synth-based album” before entering the studio but soon put that whim to bed, having never actually worked with synths before. Hence they embraced the Earlies’ lo-fi ethic, retaining the immediacy by keeping the takes down to a minimum. Well, they had to, more than two and the producers would completely lose interest.

Listen hard enough and there are Lancashire chickens on it too, apparently. That should offset the grimness perfectly.