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This album isn't about Emmy The Great.

This album wasn't meant to be about Emmy The Great.

But this album is all about Emmy The Great. It began as a series of stories just after her engagement to an atheist; after he left for the church, she realised who the stories were about.

Euan Hinshelwood, the other man in Emmy’s life, and Emmy had started work again. First Love, their debut album, felt like a long time ago. Emmy was due to be married, writing songs about characters being trapped in strange situations, and the need for the characters to make their way through it. Together, they were thinking of ways to develop the sounds of the songs, to create heightened shapes and textures. Emmy started using symbols borrowed from fairy tales and mythology in her lyrics – people trapped in houses and towers, overgrowing hair and flowers. Then she added the icons that have replaced them in our modern consciousness – industrial buildings, mushroom clouds, West London’s Trellick Tower. This was Emmy’s personal collection of myths that she fitted to her music – a genre she refers to, to herself, as digital medieval. She knew that we all have archetypal stories working away in our subconscious; that we sometimes we don’t know the difference between being awake and being asleep; how our dreams are meant to teach us things, give us messages; how songs, those tricky creatures, also live in that space. She was experiencing vivid dreams that spoke to her about the strange isolation of engagement, and of the possibility of dark times to come.

Emmy noticed that women only make it through the woods in big myths – knotty, gnarled and foreboding – if they keep their virtue. As a forthright, young woman, as scalpel-sharp as she is sweet, coldly clinical in her writing but still oddly comforting, she felt lost in the woods twice while writing the album, she says - first when she got engaged, and became the bride-to-be, when a culture’s worth of female roles came and swallowed her up. The maidens, the sirens, the witches, the sybils. The second time came when the stitches came apart.

He left their flat one-day, and never came back. He had undergone a rapid conversion to Christianity, and left the country. Emmy stayed behind with the pieces, the cancellations, the confusions. She hid in the country at her parents’ house, got lost in books about saints, archetypes, and folk tales, trying to make the world work. She went weird, she says. But she didn’t want the album to be about her. It had to save her from what had happened, but be about everything.

Virtue was made in London and Sussex. This time round, Euan and Emmy took the reins, rather than develop the songs with their full band in the studio. Euan came up with the guitar palette, strange, ambient, twisted and atmospheric, while Emmy wrote backing vocals for different voices – hysterical women, nuns and sirens, who she voiced herself. The ghosts of the Cocteau Twins and Suzanne Vega are here, as well as the stories of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, and the writing of cultural theorists like Marina Warner. Emmy wanted a cast for this album, to lift up the world she was trying to conjure, and kept albums in mind that have similar ambitions – Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea; Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid. While making it, she listened to girly pop like The Bangles, tempered with religious choirs, folk from the South Pacific, while Euan became obsessed with post-punk and Bulgarian choirs. They even spent a night Googling Enya.

Gareth Jones – known for his work with These New Puritans, Depeche Mode and Grizzly Bear ­­– was their producer. He indulged their romanticism, but understood their wish to make the music sound precise, rather than precious. Emmy also knew she had to let go, and this was the time to do it – to confront things without fear, to throw her head high, say what she thought, things she couldn’t say to herself without music. It’s this record, she says, that’s made her feel like a person.

Dinosaur Sex introduces us to a world where power stations shiver weep and leak, where trees shed their leaves, and the future is told in them. Century Of Sleep reveals a woman alone in her house as rosemary grows, and she “shifts into greenery”, and the pipes are “running bone”. Iris appears, and wonders if sights could take her eyes; Cassandra daily sees something coming, gives warnings, but can’t run. Creation imagines phantom limbs, characters wanting to be inked, Exit Night an accident coming, and the sound of sirens. North tells of missionaries who feel they have the map of humanity, without understanding some hearts beat to other rhythms. And Trellick Tower tells us Emmy’s story from its seeds to its blossom, praying for the pain to clear, as he waits on ascension.

This is a record, Emmy says, waiting for one person to get in touch - a person who will say, that happened to me too. Another person who doesn’t want to curl up, lost forever in the roots and the undergrowth, vanishing into mythic memory, into the mulch. Another person who wants to howl, endure, survive.

Virtue gives us songs for our battle sleeves. Emmy The Great wears theirs for all of us.

All pics by Alex Lake