Emma Ruth Rundle

Emma Ruth Rundle serves as singer and guitarist for the California post-rock/psych-metal group Marriages, participates in the Isis-linked post-rock ensemble Red Sparowes, and leads the atmospheric psych-folk/slowcore project Nocturnes, all while maintaining a parallel path as a solo singer/songwriter, guitarist, and visual artist. Following her 2014 debut with the gothic folk/post-rock album Some Heavy Ocean, she has delivered a sequence of atmospheric releases that includes the 2020 full-length collaboration with Louisiana sludge metallers Thou, the austere 2021 set Engine of Hell, and the 2022 improvised recording EG2: Dowsing Voice.

Although raised in Los Angeles and currently based in Louisville, Kentucky, Rundle first offered the ambient, experimental guitar pieces of Electric Guitar: One prior to issuing her initial proper solo album. That May 2014 release, Some Heavy Ocean, emerged as a cathartic collection of Mazzy Star-meets-Swans space/post-folk-rock material composed and tracked inside the home studio of Sargent House, the Echo Park indie label behind Marriages’ debut Kitsune. After Marriages issued Salome in 2015, Rundle returned with her second solo studio album, the brooding Marked for Death, again via Sargent House, in 2016. The 2017 split EP The Time Between Us with Jayle Jayle—the dark roots endeavor of Young Widows’ Evan Patterson—preceded her third solo full-length, the equestrian-themed On Dark Horses, in 2018. Two years afterward she joined Thou for the doomy post-grunge-inspired May Our Chambers Be Full; the album resonated with listeners and reviewers, prompting the January 2021 companion EP The Helm of Sorrow, which contained four similarly styled tracks. Later in 2021 she unveiled the stark, intimate Engine of Hell, which examined her personal struggles in depth. In 2022 she followed with the vocal-centric, improvisational EG2: Dowsing Voice, positioned as a sequel to the 2011 Electric Guitar: One. During 2024 Rundle partnered with Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi on the track “A Sparrow in a Swallow’s Nest.” The Sub Pop single’s A-side presented Rundle reciting her original poem “Paloma” against Shiroishi’s innovative and serene saxophone lines.