Stuck In Our Head: "Paper Forest (In the Afterglow of Rapture)" - Emmy The Great

We saw Emmy The Great live before we heard her music and we weren't overly impressed. She was so shy and unassuming that we felt we might as well turn around and stare at the back of the tent we were in, and just listen. The music was beyond lovely but we weren't sold. Fortunately we are massive fans of her on record and her second album, Virtue (out now, do buy it), is truly swoony and brilliant. A mixture of mythology, religious iconography and palaeontology (it opens with a song called "Dinosaur Sex"), the album is a folky, restless, charming thing. It's funny and self-aware but also deceptively deep. Not 'deep' in the cringe-inducing 'meaningful' sense of the word, but the more literal one. It literally feels, despite its sparse and simple arrangements, quite spacey and dark, like a big, still, musty forest.

The song above is one of its many highlights and has a gorgeous chorus that appears out of nowhere. Enjoy.

Stuck In Our Head: "First Love" - Emmy the Great

Opinion on Emmy is split, here at S&N, but one thing we can all agree on is that this, "First Love", is a gorgeous, lo-fi gem indeed. Fairly bog-standard folk instrumentation is lifted by Emmy's gentle, bruised voice and her extraordinary lyrics (she rhymes 'Hallelujah' with 'bluer'). It all builds to a lovely soft peak, and packs a biting sardonic edge ("I would forget like I’d piss on a grave, were the words as they came to my tongue"). Emmy shows promise, so enjoy.