Stream: Chelsea Wolfe & Emma Ruth Rundle, ‘Anhedonia’

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Chelsea Wolfe and Emma Ruth Rundle (Photo by Kristin Cofer)

Here’s a collaboration made in heaven … assuming heaven is dark place where deep meditation puts one in touch with every shade of emotion.

Chelsea Wolfe and Emma Ruth Rundle, who are labelmates on Sargent House and whose music occupies the same general orbit, have teamed up on the single “Anhedonia.”

Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure or find happiness in things one normally enjoys, a condition often brought on by depression. So, yes, “Anhedonia” the song is not an upper for those pandemic blues, but maybe, as Wolfe suggests, it’s an exorcism to hold them in abeyance.

Says Wolfe, who most recent album “Birth of Violence” came out in 2019: “I wrote ‘Anhedonia’ after I experienced it during summer of 2019, then tucked the song away and moved forward with my acoustic album and subsequent North American tour. When COVID-19 hit and stay-at-home orders began in 2020, my European tour was canceled and I had to fly home. Restless, I started listening through my archives of unfinished songs and little unused ideas. When I heard ‘Anhedonia’ again, it hit me how strangely relevant the lyrics felt to current times. I’d been wanting to work on a song with Emma for a long time, so I recorded it and sent it her way. She graciously added her gorgeous vocals and lead guitar, and then Ben [Chisholm] mixed it, adding his signature sound landscape as a fortress around the song. As I listened back to the final version, I was finally able to set free those emotions which I couldn’t feel back in 2019. I had worries around releasing the song, not wanting to romanticize the condition of anhedonia, but I also understood that it could possibly be cathartic for others who are struggling, as it was for me, to sing and dance my way out of a depression.”

Rundle, an L.A. native now residing in Louisville, Ky., adds, “I was moved to tears when she sent me ‘Anhedonia,’ which made getting through the tracking very emotional and slow on my end. I love the way the guitars I tracked morphed in Ben’s mix. The whole song swirls in a poignant eddy of sorrowful sound and still takes a hard swing at my heart hearing it now.”

||| Stream: “Anhedonia”