Emma Ruth Rundle is discovering that there’s more to life than loneliness. Across a decade-plus of solo recordings, the Portland-based singer-songwriter has typically favored sounds of desolation and solitude. She’s treated sparse arrangements of downtuned guitars and hermetic piano chords—occasionally punctured by trudging percussion or thorny distortion—as an abandoned landscape to wander, offering meditations on trauma, death, and destruction. Her songs have often been full of the downcast thoughts you can let yourself become consumed by when you spend too long inside your own head, something that Rundle admits she’s naturally predisposed to doing. “There was a period where… I romanticized the isolated artistic hermit lifestyle a little too hard,” she said in a recent interview. “It did me more harm than good.”
As Rundle worked on her new album These Killing Times, she was once again confronted with a world that disappointed her. Press materials say the record was written in early 2025 during “yet another climate disaster,” a statement that could refer to any number of cataclysmic events. But this time, when confronting the darkness, she decided she didn’t want to do it alone. Rundle worked with a hefty list of collaborators from around the world of heavy music—including avant-rock guitarist Nick Reinhart, drummer Jess Gowrie (who’s played with Chelsea Wolfe and metal band Horseneck), Baroness guitarist Gina Gleason, and her frequent collaborator Troy Zeigler, among many others. This isn’t the first time Rundle has worked with friends; she once made a memorably bleak album with the ultraprolific Louisiana metal band Thou. Still, the communitarian effort seems to have given her new energy and perspective.
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These Killing Times cuts a particularly stark contrast to her last album, 2021’s Engine of Hell, whose stoically introspective songs bore the marks of the process that birthed them in a remote cottage in rural Wales. Make no mistake, the songs on this album are still real downers: The tempos rarely rise above a trudge, nearly every song is wrapped in distortion, and Rundle sings of pain, torture, and violence. Still, there’s a sense of momentum and propulsion—occasionally even playfulness—that Rundle has rarely reached for.
“Enough,” which starts with a creeping guitar line that recalls Red House Painters at their most melancholic, builds toward grinding sludge-metal riffs and harmonized guitar heroics that feel uncharacteristically extroverted. The additional hands and ornamental arrangements add pops of color and vibrancy to Rundle’s typically grayscale compositions. Even the fuzzed-out dirge “Human Kindness” vibrates with life, thanks in no small part to its towering vocal harmonies and lilting string arrangement.
These uplifting moments are paired with a more expansive lyrical approach. Rundle’s best songs over the years have felt doomed, sung from the perspective of a narrator for whom there’s no hope of escaping the misery that befalls them. But These Killing Times feels a little different; across the record, there’s a clear belief in redemption. On “God’s Picture,” she offers prayers for deliverance; on “Don’t Delay Heaven,” she strains toward a perfected afterlife that’s just out of reach. On opener “Powerless,” she offers an image that feels like a mission statement for all her projects. “Let me die here with a hammer in my hand,” she sings. “One for smashing, one for making something better.” In her eyes, death and rebirth are always intertwined. The path toward an ideal world begins with destruction.
Emma Ruth Rundle: These Killing Times