When the whole world collapses around you, sometimes the only thing you can do is stomp it all loose. Erin Anne's second album, the gleaming, electrified Do Your Worst, charts that uninhibited romp through disaster. Written amid the rubble of personal grief and professional disappointment, later exacerbated by the devastation of a global pandemic, the record deepens Erin's venture into the blur between human and machine, adding a new roster of digital instruments to the mix.
Drawing on dark, glossy '80s synth-pop as well as the unabashed bombast of bands like The Killers, the L.A.-based songwriter deploys a cyborg persona to articulate a feeling of displacement from the world as a queer artist struggling to survive the machinations of late capitalism. With bright, interweaving synthesizers and ripples of Auto-Tuned vocals, Do Your Worst poses a dare to the world: Whatever you have in store, I'll take it standing.
Erin Anne's work as a guitarist, synthesist, singer, and songwriter is informed by her writing and research into queer ways of hearing and making music. Her incisive, guitar-laced synth-pop cuts through hegemonic notions of virtuosity and canon-building, inviting listeners to share in the delight of sensory experience, where musical pleasure is made anew. Her research as a UCLA PhD student in musicology, which considers the interplay between bodies and technologies and queer subjectivity in pop, directly inflects her songwriting and production.
Source [Spotify]