[Cover photo credit to Tonje Thilesen]
LA-based songwriter Erin Anne’s “maximalist” sophomore album, Do Your Worst, has just been released via Carpark Records. It brings electronic elements to bear in an experimental way and comes closest to rendering her compositional thoughts out of the work she’s released so far.
The record was “written amid the rubble of personal grief and professional disappointment”, not to mention the pandemic, and blurs the boundary “between human and machine”. The album’s title takes a challenging pose toward the world.
Do Your Worst takes inspiration from the music of Patrick Cowley, the disco and hi-NRG producer best known for working alongside Sylvester.
Erin Anne comments:
I’m very much a maximalist when it comes to production. I like vast landscapes. I like a stratosphere and a core — I want the bass to be beneath the floor. This record is, in a lot of ways, a collection of some of the first moments that I was technologically able to achieve accurate renderings of how I hear my own emotional world.
Erin Anne is pursuing her Ph.D. in musicology at UCLA. Her research into “the interplay between bodies and technologies”, as well as queer subjectivity in Pop, directly inflects her songwriting and production. She released her debut solo album, Tough Love, in 2019, and signed a deal with Carpark Records soon after.
