Emily Mackay 

Emmy the Great: Second Love review – a benchmark smashed

The sometime anti-folker’s third album is a journey from alienation to hope
  
  

emmy the great portrait
Emmy the Great: from alienation to elation. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Former anti-folker Emma-Lee Moss dropped a stunner at the end of 2014 with Swimming Pool, a spare synth-hymn to lust and wanderlust. She described that song as “a raised bar that I spent three years chasing”; Second Love is a benchmark smashed and an affecting portrait of a millennial lost soul. Songs such as Algorithm (“I hope it leads me to you”) and Hyperlink (“Walk me through the screens/ Tell me all your broken dreams”), with its sparse, hazy guitar, evoke the loneliness of digital life in the city beautifully. Gradually, alienation resolves into the hope of Dance W Me, where her flatmates’ sampled happily laughing voices supply the chorus and, finally, Lost in You’s loved-up declaration: “Once I was a flight risk… but soon I will be safe.”

 

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