Emma Blackery, Villains - album review

Emma says Villains stems from a journey that found her ‘feeling so paranoid that I risked becoming a person I didn't like’, and allowed her to ‘let go of all of that hurt’.

The rising star is pretty honest through her lyrics too. On opener Villains Pt. 1 it’s: “I am a nightmare . . . designed to destroy.” On Petty she shrugs: “You used to call me pretty, then you took out the ‘r’.”

And on the closer Villains Pt. 2, Emma is forced to consider her own part in her downfall, asking: “Am I kidding myself, blaming somebody else? I'm my own biggest villain.”

But behind the soul searching are some pretty uplifting beats and electro wizardry. She works with Toby Scott on much of her work, and he can count Little Mix, The Saturdays and Girls Aloud as former partners.

Take the bippy boppy Fake Friends. The big synths and invasive percussion in the chorus are enough to get anybody flailing limbs in a dance frenzy. But the lyrics beginning with ‘Just know your role’ will have any watcher of Attitude-era WWF wrestling channelling their inner The Rock and screaming ‘and shut your mouth’ in reply.

There are echoes of Daphne & Celeste (remember them?) during the shouty spelling bee that is Agenda. And that intro to Burn The Witch sounds like we’re about to begin an episode of Made In Chelsea – you know the sound we’re on about.

While the dancefloor intro to Third Eye and the melody which follows throughout sounds like it’s come straight from the mind that crafted Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You.

It’s a mixture of sounds from our pop worlds past, then. Yes, but not in a cheap, tacky tribute sense. Emma has a lot to say and keeps us listening to her tales, hopeful she might keep throwing us juicy titbits from her past.

It’s a solid welcoming for the Essex girl, and comfortably suggests she’s not here to make music-by-numbers. We welcome her two fingers stuck up to the norm.

Rating: 6/10

Emma Blackery performs at Birmingham’s O2 Institute 2 on October 21