Biography
Emma Ruth Rundle is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, visual artist and poet from Los Angeles, California. Her music draws on folk, alternative rock, post-rock and ambient, moving between spare acoustic songs, distorted electric guitars and improvised recordings. Alongside her solo work, she has performed with The Nocturnes, Red Sparowes and Marriages.
Her solo recording career began with music made while touring Europe with Red Sparowes in 2010. Using a small electric guitar in the back of the tour van, she recorded improvisations that became Electric Guitar: One (2011). Her first solo album centered on vocal songwriting, Some Heavy Ocean, arrived through Sargent House in 2014. Initially conceived as a sparse collection she could perform alone, it grew during recording to include drums, strings and layered guitars.
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Marked for Death (2016) and On Dark Horses (2018) brought heavier guitar arrangements to her songwriting, placing quiet passages alongside distortion and full-band performances. Between these albums, she shared the split release The Time Between Us (2017) with Jaye Jayle.
An invitation to collaborate at Roadburn brought Rundle together with Louisiana sludge metal band Thou. Their album May Our Chambers Be Full (2020) combined her melodic songwriting with the band’s heavier sound, drawing on a shared interest in grunge. Sacred Bones Records also issued the companion EP The Helm of Sorrow separately in 2021.
For Engine of Hell (2021), Rundle returned to piano, an instrument she had played in childhood. Voice, piano and acoustic guitar carried songs about memory, grief and trauma with little additional instrumentation. The more experimental EG2: Dowsing Voice appeared in 2022, although its recordings predated the writing of Engine of Hell. Made during a stay on the Welsh coast in early 2020, it explored guitar improvisation and wordless vocal techniques; its vinyl edition included a collection of her visual artwork. Her earlier instrumental work also led to film scoring: after discovering Electric Guitar: One, director Riley Stearns invited her to compose the music for Dual (2022).
Unnamed Press published Rundle’s debut poetry collection, The Bella Vista, in 2025. She paired the book with Music From the Bella Vista, assembling improvised piano, field recordings and spoken poems from material recorded over the years she spent writing it.
These Killing Times was released through Errant Child on 18 September 2026. Co-produced by Rundle and Sonny DiPerri, it returned to full-band arrangements with drummer Jess Gowrie, bassist Troy Zeigler and additional guest musicians. Rundle approached the album with the intention of making a more hopeful record, addressing shared struggles and the possibilities of community alongside personal experience.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.