There is a specific kind of freedom that sneaks up on you after a long stretch alone. You book the flight. You keep the evening to yourself. You stop negotiating the remote. Then someone interesting walks in, and the first instinct is not curiosity. It is the door. That is the joke, and the bruise, at the centre of EMEREE’s runninglikewater.
Out October 1, the track is the second taste of her forthcoming debut album Blossom. She wrote it in London with James Xavier during what she calls her summer of self-awareness. The pitch is simple and a little ruthless: becoming so comfortable alone that intimacy feels like something to escape. It sits in indie pop and alt pop, but the grain is soul-pop. Warm acoustics, understated production, stacked harmonies, and a vocal that refuses to tidy the feeling up.
EMEREE is the project of Melbourne musician, producer and multi-instrumentalist Gabrielle Emery. The records lean on Motown-tinged instrumentation, bold vocal layers and lyrics that stay unapologetically transparent. Influences she has named include Olivia Dean, RAYE and Amy Winehouse. runninglikewater is built for the same listeners who live with Ashe, Olivia Dean and Amie Blu, without copying any of them. The backing-vocal stacks and the vocal gymnastics are the signature. The arrangement stays close, almost conversational, so the performance can carry the charge.
The album frame matters. Blossom is centred on the feminine experience of blossoming back into yourself after heartbreak. This song is the awkward middle chapter, not the arrival. After more than four years single, she had learned to love her own company for real. Catching flights and not feelings was not a caption. It was the plan. Then the plan started to look like avoidance. Vulnerable, self-aware and slightly chaotic is her own description, and the track wears it without turning the chaos into a costume.
That tension is doing a lot of work in soulful pop right now. Olivia Dean’s long climb into a Grammy and rooms the size of Madison Square Garden has pulled a wider audience toward warm, literate songs about the actual shapes love takes, including the ones that do not stick. EMEREE is working the same neighbourhood from Melbourne, with a producer’s ear and a writer’s refusal to sand the edges off. She has already passed 50 million streams as an artist and producer, supported acts in sold-out theatres, and earlier this year joined Paris Paloma on her Australian tour. Prominence, the previous single, picked up community and commercial radio, Spotify editorial placements and a music video that travelled. Collaborations with Grammy-winning producers and a headline show coming up in Melbourne put the debut album in a different room from a one-off single.
What runninglikewater does well is stay small. No stadium metaphor. No lecture about healing. Just warm acoustics, harmony stacks, and the slightly embarrassing admission that solitude can become a hideout you are proud of. If Blossom keeps this close to the diary, the album will not need a bigger concept than the one already in the title.
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What do you think of this kind of soulful indie pop, the songs that admit you might be running from a good thing? Drop it in the comments.
