Exile In The Outer Ring

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 album is unique in its mingling of gender politics with American working-class anxiety. The voices we hear in these songs - druggy, surly societal outcasts; Byronic nihilists bringing down fire - speak to a kind of rebellion that's typically reserved for men, and the archetype of the "dirtbag teenage boy" dominates the album. Yet EMA claims some of that same dirtbag alienation for women - "a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole," as EMA puts it - and uses it to interrogate both her own vulnerability and how male violence shapes the world, as on the anthemic "Aryan Nation."

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