Emmy The Great
★★★★ April BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
Emmy The Great’s latest combines Canto pop with warm neo-folk. BORN IN Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and English father, EmmaLee Moss (née Great), has lived in London and New York, feeling “caught between destinies”. These songs grew out of a visit to Hong Kong, two years before the antiExtradition Law protests in 2019, and form an exploration of home, belonging and her Cantonese identity. Recorded in Brooklyn with singing bowls, prayer bells and field recording of the gentle chug of the Hong Kong subway, April has sonic traces of all these places – blending Canto pop strings, for instance, with loose country pop and melodic distortion. Her songs are beautifully, tentatively constructed, the arch quirkiness of her early albums now replaced by the lush writing of songs such as Chang-E or Okinawa, with its standout line, “Our parents dreamed of escape/Now all their dreams are ours.”
Lucy O’Brien