UK-based musician Emily Cross uses her work as Cross Record as a way to explore the nuance and consequence of the choices we make every day. Her upcoming album, Crush Me, focuses on how we cope with the pressures and chaos of existence. She continues to mine our existential crises and the resulting revelations on “Led Through Life”, a song that feels as elusive as smoke slipping your fingers and as mesmerizing as a lighting storm over the ocean. Pairing her ethereal voice with clarinet, synth, and various ambient recordings, she carefully crafts a landscape in which where we’re given the opportunity to reassess the choices we’ve made and what alternate realities might exist had we chosen a different path. Are we the arbiters of our own fate, or are there forces working outside of our understanding? Cross makes the case that sometimes the answer isn’t as clear as we might like it to be.
“One possibility regarding our experience here is that we are being led by unseen forces, perhaps an alien species,” says Cross. “I am without a body. I can still see, but there is no time, only space. I am engulfed, maybe abducted from a beach somewhere. Something always pulls me back to this life into this body and I keep continuing on for now.“
Listen below.
Crush Me is out March 21 on Ba Da Bing Records. You can pre-order the album here. Follow Cross Record on X and Instagram.
