Erika M. Anderson, known musically as EMA, released her third studio album Exile in the Outer Ring back in August. She then followed that up with an outtakes EP, appropriately titled Outtakes From Exile, which is where the song "MopTops (Twist While the World Stops)" comes from. Anderson said this about the song: "I made this song two years ago with my friend Severiano Martinez who also worked on ‘Amnesia Haze’ and ‘Fire Water Air LSD.’ He does a lot of art stuff but is also edits video – my demo of this was much slower but he approached like an editor and chopped it all up and made it much faster. It was alchemy. The lyrics were improvised, I was thinking about the ’50s and ’60s living under the constant threat of nuclear war… People doing the twist in a red light nuclear fallout bomb blast, about the haircuts from then, ‘mop tops.’ But now we have these two crazy world leaders with crazy hideous hair threatening to blow each other up!" Outtakes From Exile is out now on City Slang. Check out her KEXP in-studio performance from last October below. - Jasmine Albertson
