If pop-punk was always weighed down with a lot of sonic baggage, from its often predictable musical template to its wackier-than-thou frat-boy image, Emma Rae is here to shake things up.
Emerging quickly and almost fully formed during collaborative writing sessions with Nick Kauffman, ‘Beacon’ not only adds depth to pop-punk’s often shallow waters but also runs on more complex sonic tides. It is these additional creative ebbs and flows – brooding lulls, acoustic motifs threaded through raw and raucous guitars, a clever, ever-changing dynamic, digital pulses amongst the analogue beats (I think) – that make this so progressive in a genre that was often anything but.
Lyrically too, Rae swerves the clichés for something more relatable and purposeful, something raw and real, a musing on those times when you find yourself faced with unrequited affection, when the object of your desires is unaware of your feelings, seeing you as merely a good friend. It is always about how we fail to grab opportunities, perhaps through fear of rejection, and so just carry on as before.
‘Beacon’ is great; it injects pop-punk, alt-rock, pop-rock, whatever you want to call it, with a hard dose of reality. Its musical arrangements follow the ups and downs of our protagonist’s emotional turmoil; it is big, of course, but it is also so, so clever.
Mature pop-punk? Who’d have thought it?
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