When desire loses its direction - with no person or object to pin itself to - it has a strange tendency to turn us toward the past. We find ourselves surveying past infatuations and failed romances. Armed with the knowledge of hindsight, previous entanglements reconfigure and reveal themselves. Sometimes, we become privy to the true nature of our attraction, or learn the patterns that have played out across our romantic lives to which we have been blind. Nothing can be quite as bracing or mortifying. Emma Russack would know.
These reassessments and revelations stretch across About The Girl, her brilliant, searching sixth record, produced by Russack and long-time collaborator John Lee at Phaedra Studios. This is an album about longing's impossible force, tackling how relationships both muddle and illuminate one's sense of self.
Russack says the record is partly inspired by the dissociations brought on by dating apps. "It's about the funny experiences that happen when you're untethered" she says, "I had these awful experiences and encounters, that made me also reflect on my past experiences with different people, romantic or otherwise."
Often, Russack sings in a daze, trying to grasp the contours of memories that have blurred. But she hauls specificity back with hard-won vigour, pasting details together and creating new constellations of understanding. In the thrall of past experience, Russack's songwriting reaches new heights; merging plain-spoken disclosures with mordant humour. History's constant murmur is felt through the record's spectral, spacious sound, full of elegant harmonies, heavily strummed guitar and ominous synths that reverberate and splutter. Fascination sits at the glistening centre of the record. It appears in full-force on the title track, a beguiling synth-pop song about the allure of the inscrutable.
