Erin Anne Shares New Single 'Typhoid Mary'

Ahead of the release of her sophomore album Do Your Worst (due out on June 10th, 2022 via Carpark Records), and following the release of tracks "Eve Polastri's Last Two Brain Cells Have A Debate" and "Echo Park Vampire", today Erin Anne has shared new track, "Typhoid Mary" and its brilliantly-tense accompanying video.

Aurally, "Typhoid Mary" proves a widescreen, technicolor homage to electro-pop, specifically to Norwegian icon Susanne Sundfør. Thematically, it draws from feelings of isolation sparked by systemic prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community in an eerily prescient (the track was written pre-pandemic) reference to historically renowned asymptomatic typhoid carrier Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary", who infected dozens with her affliction and was forcibly quarantined for over two decades of her life.

Erin elaborates: "I've always wanted to make music like Susanne Sundfør-gothic, expansive, ornate, simultaneously threatening and alluring-and so, one day, I decided that I would try. The lyrics came quickly once I'd had the experience of being denied $25,000 in research money on account of my identity and investments in research that centers queer experiences. I'm paraphrasing, but I was essentially told, "We do not want you representing our foundation because of who you are, despite your advisor's repeated reminders that you are by far the best candidate for the fellowship."

"A lot of my long-healed (or so I thought) childhood struggles with internalized homophobia and shame came bubbling up after that. It felt like I was contagious, or infectious, somehow-that my mere presence or involvement with a project would taint it and destroy it from the inside, that my queerness was a transmissible pathogen that should be contained and suppressed. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became, and the more determined I was to be as loudly and offensively queer as possible. I figured, if these people are that sickened by me, maybe that's a weapon I can use to get revenge.

Erin continues, "It should be noted that this song is in no way an endorsement of Typhoid Mary, who was essentially the anti-masker of the early 20th century and infected over 50 people with her asymptomatic case of typhoid fever as a result. Still, I do feel that her story serves as a useful metaphor here. The grant denial incident made me feel like an abjected academic version of a Typhoid Mary-like character."

When the whole world collapses around you, sometimes the only thing you can do is stomp it all loose. Erin Anne's second album, the gleaming, electrified Do Your Worst, charts that uninhibited romp through disaster. Written amid the rubble of personal grief and professional disappointment, later exacerbated by the devastation of a global pandemic, the record deepens Erin's venture into the blur between human and machine, adding a new roster of digital instruments to the mix.

Drawing on dark, glossy '80s synthpop as well as the unabashed bombast of bands like The Killers, the L.A.-based songwriter deploys a cyborg persona to articulate a feeling of displacement from the world as a queer artist struggling to survive the machinations of late capitalism. With bright, interweaving synthesizers and ripples of Auto-Tuned vocals, Do Your Worst poses a dare to the world: Whatever you have in store, I'll take it standing.

Erin began writing her second album not long after adding a MIDI keyboard and vocal processing hardware to her home studio setup. While exploring her new gear, she found that she could work in the same vein as the artists and producers she loved the most. Do Your Worst takes inspiration from the music of Patrick Cowley, the disco and hi-NRG producer best known for working alongside Sylvester.

Erin was taken by Cowley's use of vocoder on the 1982 album Mind Warp, where his distorted vocals create a queer, mutant subjectivity. That album rang out against the cataclysm of the AIDS epidemic; Erin found resonance in Cowley's music during the present-day pandemic. "I have found the most catharsis and the most safety in listening to the music of people in really, really horrific circumstances making something lasting and profoundly beautiful," she says.

Throughout Do Your Worst, which was mixed by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, songs like "Typhoid Mary" and "Florida" reckon with loss, despair, and abjection. "This Hungry Body" sears through pandemic-era touch starvation, while "Mirror Mirror" attends to the noxious but necessary funhouse of social media.

On the playful, guitar-driven "Eve Polastri's Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate," Erin uses the spy thriller TV show Killing Eve to explore queer codependency and masochism. Among these fraught subjects, Erin Anne finds opportunities for release. She stages internal conflict on a scale so massive that its details start to become clear; if they don't resolve, they at least become palpable.

"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," Erin says. "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's work as a guitarist, synthesist, singer, and songwriter is informed by her writing and research into queer ways of hearing and making music. She works from the assumption that there's no such thing as objective listening -- that everything we listen to is shaded by who we are, where we've been, and the people with whom we share our experience. Her incisive, guitar-laced synth-pop cuts through hegemonic notions of virtuosity and canon-building, inviting listeners to share in the delight of sensory experience, where musical pleasure is made anew.

Originally from New Jersey, Erin attended college at Bowdoin and lived for a time in Portland, ME before moving to Los Angeles to pursue 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.

As a teenager in New Jersey, Erin had limited access to queer art and music that reflected her identity. After beginning her undergraduate studies, she found her world blown open by the documentary The Punk Singer, which traces the life and career of Kathleen Hanna, singer in the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Inspired by Hanna, Erin started her own riot grrrl band and began feeling out the ways the guitar could create sounds outside of masculinist ideals of physical skill -- how she could rearrange sound according to her own pleasure.

Erin released her debut solo album, Tough Love, in 2019, and signed a deal with Carpark Records soon after. On both Tough Love and the forthcoming Do Your Worst Erin merges her voice with its technological accompaniments, seeding delightful bewilderment about where the human ends and where the machinery supporting it begins. For her, it's an illusory seam. The real fun starts where everything that's supposed to be kept separate starts flowing together, germinating new shapes in the mess.

Watch the new music video here:

To post a comment, you must register and login.