Alternative
Errant Child · 18 September 2026
There are eight songs, and on the first one, “Powerless”, Emma Ruth Rundle does not play the solo: Nick Reinhart does. It is a small decision and it tells you how the record is built. After “Engine of Hell” (2021), which was her alone with a piano and a guitar, “These Killing Times” has a standing band again — Jess Gowrie on drums and Troy Zeigler on bass — plus guests who come in for one specific thing and leave: Patrick Shiroishi with saxophone on “God’s Picture”, Camille Getz on violin and Jason Adams on cello on “Anvil”, Amelia Baker on backing vocals.
She has presented it as a turn outward: a deliberate decision to make a hopeful record instead of closing in, with community and resilience as its subject. The credits, though, say something else: “all songs written and performed by Emma Ruth Rundle”, with Gowrie and Zeigler playing and nothing more. The turn is in the material, not in the way of working, and you hear it on songs like “Anvil” or “Don’t Delay Heaven”, where the band executes an idea that arrived already settled. When that breaks — the acoustic stretch of “Enough” that suddenly goes electric — the record breathes differently.
It came out on 18 September on Errant Child, which is her own imprint: this is not a Sargent House release, and Sargent House is the label reissuing her back catalogue, the one putting “Marked for Death” and “On Dark Horses” back in shops on 4 December. She produces it with Sonny Diperri, who also records and mixes it, between LMNL studios in Santa Monica and Octopus Beak in Los Angeles, and Stephen Marcussen masters. The cover, by Mason Rose, is a red, out-of-focus photograph of her singing behind a sheet, and it is fairly literal: the record sounds as though everything were happening on the other side of that sheet, her voice included. “Catherine Wheel” comes closest to a grunge single; “Oceans of Time” closes, at two twenty-two.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre