EMA - Exile In The Outer Ring

Exile In The Outer Ring is the fourth studio album by American musician EMA (Erika M Anderson), released in August 2017 via City Slang.

After the success of 2011’s Past Life Martyred Saints and 2014’s prophetic The Future’s Void, EMA retreated to a basement in Portland, Oregon. A generic apartment complex in a non-trendy neighbourhood, with beige carpeting and cheap slat blinds. Now, she returns, with a portrait of The Outer Ring: A pitch-black world of dark night highways, American flags hung over basement windows, jails and revival meetings and casinos and rage.

In a year dominated by white working-class alienation and anger, EMA a Midwesterner who never lost her thousand-yard stare has delivered an album that renders Middle American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy.

The result is a deeply personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form.

This limited LP record is on red coloured vinyl with a printed inner sleeve and digital download code, pressed in Europe.