She is a famil­iar face to any­one who’s seen The Orielles live over the past cou­ple of years… and now Emi­ly Zukows­ki, aka Mode­ma, has stepped for­ward and released a track of her own. 

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Emi­ly has also been work­ing on her own mate­r­i­al, some­thing she’s been busy with for years, and Run­ning Back is her debut sin­gle, released on Cor­ri­dor of Dreams. 

‘Run­ning Back’ finds her perched between the worlds of club tex­tures and exper­i­men­tal pop, occu­py­ing the same space as ML Buch, Jen­ny Hval & Car­o­line Polachek. Work­ing behind the counter at Man­ches­ter’s Pic­cadil­ly Records opened a gate­way into the var­i­ous realms of elec­tron­ic music, a rich diet of hyper­pop, ambi­ent & elec­tron­i­ca feed­ing into the project’s com­plex futur­is­tic sound.

Self-pro­duced along­side Joel Antho­ny Patch­ett (The Orielles, King Krule, Jane Weaver), Run­ning Back is a patch­work made up of frag­ments of vocals atop som­nam­bu­list synth lines & scat­tered drum pat­terns. The basslines fluc­tu­ate from gen­tle melodies to pul­sat­ing rhythms. 

The track shares with The Orielles the same lev­el of impec­ca­ble pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties. And Emi­ly is adept at lay­er­ing calm­ing, well-mod­u­lat­ed, vel­vety vocals on a rich foun­da­tion of sparkling synths. 

“I think this is a reflec­tion of my scram­bled inner mono­logue – it’s a patch­work of thoughts and feel­ings rather than a sto­ry,” explains Emi­ly. “I guess gen­er­al­ly it’s about a frag­ment­ed feel­ing of self and try­ing to main­tain a con­nec­tion with oth­ers and the world in gen­er­al. The open­ing line ‘You’re in two’ refers to the mind being split in two – feel­ing like a mul­ti­tude of things rather than a sol­id whole. And ‘run­ning back’ is about return­ing to a feel­ing of final­i­ty and wholeness.”

Mode­ma debut sin­gle: Run­ning Back on Cor­ri­dor of Dreams, out now

Top pho­to: ©Giu­lia Bon­nomet­ti
Sec­ond pho­to at Green Man: ©Olivia Rosen