“I don’t want to put myself out and turn it into a refrain” – EMA, “3Jane”.

Erika M Anderson’s debut album Past Life Martyred Saints was an extremely personal, extremely open look at her past covering subjects such as self harm, domestic violence and, as a displaced South Dakotan, honest looks at her adopted home state of California. This time around, on her second album as EMA, she’s addressing the here and now. No less personal or confrontational, The Future’s Void is an (unintentionally) topical look at internet and surveillance, and how we exist online.

Stylistically speaking, The Future’s Void pushes the sounds of Past Life to their extremes; the noise and electronics of the debut record are furthered by opening track “Satellites” which celebrates the sound of Anderson’s old band Gowns while also acting as a sister to someone like brutal NYC industrialist Pharmakon, and the metallic clatter of “Neuromancer” (William Gibson’s prescient sci-fi writing is a huge influence on theme) takes a track like “California” and puts it through an electronic wrangler. But there’s also the other extreme, a kind of pop side to EMA, that’s also pushed further with a track like “So Blonde” (a song that deals in the exploitation of the image of the blonde female) which, despite the throat-shredding chorus, is grunge-pop like latter period Hole, or even something Linda Perry might put her name to. “When She Comes” is something similar again and almost a relief point against the noise in that it’s an acoustic strum with a surprisingly intimate vocal from Anderson.

Returning to that opening track “Satellites” for the moment, Anderson draws an interesting parallel between the current Snowden/NSA farrago and the Cold War, singing “And I remember when the world was divided / By a wall of concrete and a cube full of iron” and pointing out there’s probably more surveillance satellites in operation now than during Reagan’s SDI Star Wars years. That track is a comment on the wider socio-political climate, but Anderson is at her incisive best when she brings the personal into play. “3Jane” is quite beautiful in its simple piano and ambient electronics, and Anderson’s best vocal performance to date, but it’s her lyrical address to the internet that is so touching, so spot-on that I can’t really do it justice…so here’s Anderson herself:

“Feel like I blew my soul out across the interweb / and screamed / it was a million pieces of silver / watch them gleam! / it left a hole so big inside / of me / and I get terrified that I’ll never get it back to me, to me, to me, to me…I guess it’s just a modern disease”.

The Future’s Void is an album that, rather than plead with us to disconnect from the online, asks us to face up to a world with where internet, surveillance, selfies, the NSA aren’t going to go away, and to find a way to continue to interact with this technology in a constructive and positive fashion. And we have to do this, as I don’t see anyone becoming less engaged with the internet any time soon. The future’s void. We’re in it and between it already, so how are you going to deal with it? As EMA asks us on “Neuromancer”…”You choose, you choose”.