Emma Ruth Rundle

Emma Ruth Rundle was born on October 10, 1983, in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in Los Angeles in a household built around folk music, with a pianist father passing along an early sense of melody^[1]. After an earthquake shook the region in the early 1990s, her mother brought her, at eight years old, to McCabe's Guitar Shop, where she first rented a Celtic harp before switching to guitar at twelve and writing her first songs at thirteen^[1]. She briefly studied music technology at CalArts before leaving the program^[1].

Her earliest band was the Nocturnes, formed in 2007, whose folk-inflected, chamber-pop and post-rock atmospheres appeared on the EP Wellington and the albums A Year of Spring and Aokigahara^[1]. She went on to join Red Sparowes as guitarist, appearing on the post-rock outfit's final studio album, and later formed the trio Marriages with her Red Sparowes bandmates, releasing the EP Kitsune and the album Salome^[1]. Her solo career, launched with Some Heavy Ocean in 2014, continued through Marked for Death and On Dark Horses, and included a 2020 collaboration with the sludge metal band Thou, May Our Chambers Be Full^[1].

Rundle has spoken candidly about a history of addiction beginning in her early teens and a period spent in a mental health hospital before she got sober^[1]. She married musician Evan Patterson of Jaye Jayle and Young Widows and relocated with him to Louisville, Kentucky, before the couple divorced in August 2021; she has since resettled in Portland, Oregon^[1]. That period of upheaval shadowed her fifth solo album, Engine of Hell, a stripped-down, largely solo record that critics linked to grief, addiction, and loneliness, and that one reviewer called her magnum opus^[2].

Her sixth album, These Killing Times, released September 18, 2026 on her own label Errant Child and produced by longtime collaborator Sonny Diperri, marks a deliberate turn away from that minimalist solitude^[3]. Rundle rebuilt a full band around drummer Jess Gowrie and brought in a wide circle of collaborators, including Patrick Shiroishi, Marissa Nadler, and Baroness guitarist Gina Gleason, describing the choice as a way to feel fortified by friendship rather than isolated by the record's difficult subject matter^[4]. Lead single "Powerless" set the album's tone, with Rundle stating plainly that she refuses to let her agency and resolve become corrupted by the news cycle she was responding to^[5].