Cross Record - Crush Me (2025) Hi-Res

Crush Me, Cross Record‘s first album in six years, slinks, crawls and heaves its mass through twelve songs that feel like those thoughts that drift in before sleep. It doesn’t begin and end so much as unravel and reform. Voices flicker, vanish, return. Violence flares, then ebbs into something quieter, like pale light filtering through from another room. This is not your usual listening experience.

It’s not surprising to learn these songs were born in a state of flux. Emily Cross first recorded them in Germany with a shifting group of musicians – skeletal and undefined demos, leaving room for improvisation, for the unknown. And then things collapsed. A label deal faded into silence. Collaborators drifted away. When she returned to the work, it was scattered, raw, waiting for shape. Rather than impose order, she let it remain that way—unfinished, unresolved.

It makes sense, then, that Crush Me is an album about dissolution. Like the time-lapse scenes in Peter Greenaway’s Zed & Two Noughts, Crush Me excavates memory just to watch it decay again. In ‘Charred Grass,’ Cross sings over hushed guitar, repeating the phrase “I feel real” as though trying to prove something to herself. The song orbits a single surreal image: a mother cow standing over her calf on scorched ground, watching as she drives by. Some things vanish, some things remain.

‘Dorset Area of Natural Beauty’ is more unsettled and eerie in its solitude. Cross’s voice is half-buried, murmuring “Fire so hot and nice, burns out my insides”. The English countryside she describes is insistent, knocking her off balance. Relentless messages ping on her phone, then, a surreal moment, her grip loosens: “A car comes by, runs over it”. Dorset, in its beauty, is not peaceful. It’s a place where silence isn’t stillness but something else, something creeping in.