Crush Me, Cross Record‘s first album in six years, slinks, crawls and heaves its mass through twelve songs that feel like those thoughts that drift in before sleep. It doesn’t begin and end so much as unravel and reform. Voices flicker, vanish, return. Violence flares, then ebbs into something quieter, like pale light filtering through from another room. This is not your usual listening experience.
It’s not surprising to learn these songs were born in a state of flux. Emily Cross first recorded them in Germany with a shifting group of musicians – skeletal and undefined demos, leaving room for improvisation, for the unknown. And then things collapsed. A label deal faded into silence. Collaborators drifted away. When she returned to the work, it was scattered, raw, waiting for shape. Rather than impose order, she let it remain that way—unfinished, unresolved.
It makes sense, then, that Crush Me is an album about dissolution. Like the time-lapse scenes in Peter Greenaway’s Zed & Two Noughts, Crush Me excavates memory just to watch it decay again. In ‘Charred Grass,’ Cross sings over hushed guitar, repeating the phrase “I feel real” as though trying to prove something to herself. The song orbits a single surreal image: a mother cow standing over her calf on scorched ground, watching as she drives by. Some things vanish, some things remain.
‘Dorset Area of Natural Beauty’ is more unsettled and eerie in its solitude. Cross’s voice is half-buried, murmuring “Fire so hot and nice, burns out my insides”. The English countryside she describes is insistent, knocking her off balance. Relentless messages ping on her phone, then, a surreal moment, her grip loosens: “A car comes by, runs over it”. Dorset, in its beauty, is not peaceful. It’s a place where silence isn’t stillness but something else, something creeping in.
Even in its quietest moments, Crush Me is tense. ‘Pearl Through a Funnel’ is strangely melodic, though its sweetness is streaked with menace. “I cannot sleep, I’m having violent dreams”, Cross sings, the melody gliding over a drum pattern that feels like it could buckle at any moment. In ‘Cutting a Cake,’ she spirals deeper into herself, her voice encased in a grinding bowed bass line. “It’s peace, to feel / It’s pressure, it’s touch, it’s care”. The words repeat like an incantation, as if by naming these sensations she might understand them. The percussion—spidery, delicate, insistent—tightens around her, but she never breaks free.
‘Led Through Life’ is lighter, and shifts its energy. Vocals hover just above the instrumentation, as if Cross herself is only half-present. All its parts stitched together by Seth Manchester’s careful mix, everything feels fragile but whole. And then, ‘God Fax’ shatters it. The song is a slow-moving panic, its wheezing breaths sharp and mechanical, the vocals flat and flattened into something inhuman. “I am calm in the absence of reason”, Cross repeats, as though the words might make it true. Fear builds, the music heaving, restless. Then, suddenly, the lights come on. The song explodes into a Bosch-like fever dream, where everything the mind has tried to suppress takes on shape and sound. This sentiment returns, with sinister piano and whispered refrains, on ‘Designed in Hell’, an overwhelming sense of despair wrapped in gaudy Motel decor, bug spray and memories of a former life.
And then there is ‘Crush Me,’ the title track, a final moment of surrender. It doesn’t rage against destruction but welcomes it. “Godly foot, crush me”, Cross pleads. Not desperation, not fear—something quieter, a breath released. If the album has been circling around dissolution, here it happens, simply and without struggle.
The final song, ‘Twisted Up Fence,’ closes the record with something softer, stranger. Cross sings about memory, the way it lingers in objects: a fence warped by time, a face in an apple, a box under the bed. “You say it’s an endless abyss / And I say the abyss is the best”, she whispers, not as defiance, but as a kind of release. The song’s ending drifts, slipping away before it can be captured. The album ends the way it began—weightless, unfinished, evaporating into the air.
Cross Record has always been more about atmosphere than form, a world that is entered rather than listened to. Crush Me follows that trajectory, but here, more than ever, Emily Cross disappears into the work itself. There’s a starkness in these songs, a refusal to shape them into something traditionally satisfying. The lyrics often circle around a single moment—fire burning a field, a car running over a lost object, the taste of frosting—images that feel like flashes of memory, fragments without context. Time isn’t linear; it spirals, loops, unspools. But there’s something radical in how she lets things be—half-finished, fractured, floating. Crush Me never builds to a climax, because it was never trying to get anywhere in the first place. It just moves like mist rolling over wet fields—there, and then gone.
‘Crush Me’ is released on 21st March, via Ba Da Bing.
