These Killing Times

Album titles are usually a summary. Emma Ruth Rundle's sixth record does something blunter, closer to a diagnosis. "These Killing Times" doesn't name a person, a place, or a single feeling. It names an era, and it says so with the flat certainty of someone who has stopped arguing about whether the label is deserved.

It's worth saying plainly, before going further, that no song on the record actually carries this title. The eight tracks are Powerless, God's Picture, Anvil, Catherine Wheel, Don't Delay Heaven, Enough, Human Kindness, and Oceans of Time^[6]. "These Killing Times" sits above all of them: the phrase Rundle chose to describe the record as a whole rather than any one song inside it^[1]. That distinction changes what the title is doing. It isn't a hook borrowed from a chorus. It reads more like a verdict, delivered before the first track even starts, about the conditions every song on the album was written under.

A Turn Outward

Rundle's fifth album, Engine of Hell, released in 2021, was a minimalist, largely solo record, built around raw takes with few overdubs, that critics connected to grief, addiction, and loneliness during a period of her life that included divorce and early sobriety^[8]. These Killing Times reverses nearly every one of those choices. Produced by longtime collaborator Sonny Diperri, it rebuilds a full band around drummer Jess Gowrie and bassist Troy Zeigler, and folds in a wide circle of additional musicians, saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, violinist Camille Getz, cellist Jason Adams, guitarists Nick Reinhart and Gina Gleason, and vocalists including Marissa Nadler^[6][7].

Rundle has framed that shift in personnel as inseparable from the album's argument. Rather than retreat further into private songwriting, she wanted, in her own words, to feel fortified by friendship and to be in community with other musicians, making something that pushed back against isolation^[3]. If Engine of Hell was the sound of one person working through pain alone, These Killing Times insists that the response to a shared crisis has to be built collectively, not soloed out.

Naming the Crisis

Rundle has described this record as her most overtly political work, telling one interviewer that it's meant to be an anti-fascist record at its core^[2]. She has connected its urgency to a specific stretch of lived experience: watching wildfire disaster unfold at close range in early 2025, an event that made continuing to write only about the private, interior self feel irresponsible^[4][9]. The songs take aim at a cluster of related targets: the resurgence of Christian nationalism, the erosion of civil rights, and the concentration of extreme wealth^[9]. "Enough," for instance, reworks a piece of biblical imagery to confront billionaire excess directly^[9].

The album's lead single, "Powerless," carries a particularly pointed backstory. It was developed under a working title referencing philosopher Noam Chomsky, reflecting Rundle's disillusionment with a public intellectual she felt had failed a basic test of moral accountability^[5]. Rather than let that disillusionment curdle into resignation, she has said she refuses to let her own agency and resolve become corrupted, and hopes the song extends that refusal to whoever is listening^[5].

Feminine Rage, Not Metaphorical Rage

Coverage of the album has repeatedly reached for a specific phrase to describe its emotional register: anti-patriarchal feminist rage^[3][9]. That framing matters because it locates the record's anger somewhere more specific than generalized political frustration. The killing in the title isn't abstract; it is gendered, structural, and historical, aimed at systems Rundle links explicitly to patriarchal power, from the far-right movements she names directly to the economic structures that let a handful of billionaires accumulate wealth while everyone else absorbs the cost^[2][9].

That anger sits alongside, rather than replaces, the vulnerability that has defined Rundle's songwriting since her earliest solo records. Reviewers have consistently noted the album balances defiance with a tenderness inherited from her older, quieter work^[1][9]. The result is a record that can sound like a rallying cry on one track and a private confession on the next, without treating those two modes as contradictory.

Hope as a Discipline

For an album this angry, Rundle has been unusually insistent that hope belongs in the mix, and not as decoration. She has said hope is an important feeling to keep on the record because she needs it herself, recognizing that without it, the motivation to keep pushing for change tends to collapse^[2]. That's a more disciplined claim than it sounds: it treats hope not as an emotional default but as something that has to be actively built into the work, the same way the album's community of collaborators had to be actively assembled rather than left to chance.

The record closes on "Oceans of Time," also referred to under the title "What Should We Live For"^[1]. Ending on a question rather than an answer fits the album's overall posture. Rather than resolve the tension between rage and hope, the closing track leaves it open, asking listeners to sit with what should matter once fear and immediate survival stop being the only things driving a life.

Why the Phrase Still Lands

Part of why "These Killing Times" works as a title is that it refuses to specify which killing it means. It can refer to the literal violence of far-right politics, to the slower attrition of a warming planet, to the erosion of rights that makes daily life feel more precarious, or to the quieter cruelty of economic systems that treat people as disposable^[9][4]. Rundle doesn't pick one; the phrase is built to hold all of them at once, which is part of what makes it feel less like hyperbole and more like an honest description of the news cycle it responds to.

That refusal to specify is also what connects this record back to Rundle's earlier work, even as its subject matter turns outward. Her songwriting has always dealt in extremity, addiction, grief, isolation, spiritual crisis^[7][8], and These Killing Times essentially widens the aperture from personal extremity to collective extremity without changing the underlying instinct. The same artist who once turned inward to document a marriage ending is now turning outward to document a political moment collapsing, and the emotional register carries over almost unchanged.

A Title That Argues With Itself

Listeners and critics don't have to agree on which half of the title's implicit argument, the killing or the resistance to it, carries more weight. The record itself seems to hold that tension deliberately unresolved: a desire for companionship and connection sits directly alongside a confrontation with some of the most violent parts of humanity, and the album never fully resolves which one wins out^[1]. Read one way, "These Killing Times" is a lament, a naming of harm with no illusions about how quickly it can be undone. Read another way, it's closer to a mission statement, the first step in refusing to let that harm go unnamed.

Both readings are supported by the same material, which is probably the point. An album built by community, scored by a returning full band, and closing on an open question about what's worth living for isn't interested in offering comfort or despair as a final answer. It offers the title instead: a phrase blunt enough to sit over eight very different songs and still describe all of them accurately, a naming of the moment that refuses to let the moment go unnamed.