EMMMA

A Connecticut childhood, a London reset

EMMMA was raised in Westport, Connecticut, and started formal music lessons absurdly early — violin at two, then piano, then local musical theatre. The route from there to a London base and a stage name spelled with three Ms took years, part of them spent releasing music under her given name, Emma Charles. The rebrand drew a line under that earlier catalogue rather than extending it: the new name arrived with new material and a deliberately darker palette.

The move itself became the subject matter. 'Fall From Grace', out on 24 September 2026, was written with Ben Wylen and Zoe Giosa-Hirsch about a month before she left the city she had been living in, and she has described it as a breakup song about a place rather than a person — grief at going, tangled up with a sense of having failed there.

Asked in an interview published in August about the shift in tone, she framed it as a decision rather than a drift: "I'm done apologising. I've been apologising a lot, and I am so sick of it… I only want to care about what I want to make versus what other people's expectations of me are."

Two EPs that do not sound like the same writer

The debut EP, 'Secondary Character', came out on 28 November 2024 and sat in quieter territory — confessional, sparsely arranged, and compared on release to Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius. It is the record that established the character of the title: the person standing slightly off to the side of someone else's story.

'Wednesday's Child' followed in 2025 and took a much bigger swing. Six tracks — 'Cards', 'Cut The Breaks', 'Wednesday's Child', 'Burning Bridges', 'Whiplash' and 'Morning' — trace an arc from a relationship that has stopped working through reflection and out the other side, closing on the calmest thing on the EP. 'Burning Bridges' and 'Whiplash' went out as singles ahead of it; 'Cards' was the focus track, and she described it as being about trying to enjoy the final moments of a relationship before it ends, just for a little longer.

On the subject of the EP's central loss she has been blunt about the comparison she kept hearing: "I've heard a lot of people compare it to losing a limb, this feeling of walking around as though something crucial is missing. Everything just stopped, and it kept stopping." The production around that writing is where the two EPs separate — where 'Secondary Character' was acoustic-leaning, 'Wednesday's Child' is electronic, percussive and built for rooms rather than headphones.

A singles run, and radio paying attention

Rather than rushing a third EP, 2026 was spent on singles. 'Honey' was picked up early by BBC Radio. 'Russian Roulette' was played on Elton John's Rocket Hour. 'Experiment' arrived in July 2026 and premiered on BBC Radio 1's Future Pop. 'Fall From Grace' closed the sequence on 24 September.

A review of that last single, published on 29 September 2026, singled out the chorus line — "You call it a fall from grace, I call it a prison break" — and described a vocal that pairs "Madison Beer-esque pop poise" with "Florence Welch's darker vocal corners" over production that alternates between delicate breaths and mechanical heft. The same writer's conclusion was that she is heading for bigger things, and advised anyone catching the autumn support dates to get down the front.

Her own site lists the next one, 'Porcelain', for 12 November — landing in the middle of the European touring block rather than being held back until it is over.

From The Grace to the Eventim Apollo

The headline step came first. On 20 November 2025 she announced a four-date debut UK run, promoted by Liift: 26 April at SWG3's Poetry Club in Glasgow, 30 April at The Grace in London, 2 May at The Louisiana in Bristol and 3 May in the basement at YES in Manchester. Capacities in the low hundreds, in other words, and she said at the time that it felt like the right moment to re-introduce herself as a headline artist rather than a guest.

Everything either side of that has been other people's rooms. She played Tenement Trail and Lock In, then spent October 2025 as special guest on Pale Waves' Still Smitten tour across the UK and Ireland, with 'Wednesday's Child' landing mid-run. In autumn 2026 she opened for Suki Waterhouse in the United States between 27 September and 16 October.

Since 11 November 2026 she has been on MUNA's Gets So Hot Tour through the UK and Europe, a run that finishes on 27 November. The listed dates include the O2 Academy in Glasgow on 13 November, the O2 Apollo in Manchester on 14 November, two nights at the Eventim Apollo in London on 17 and 18 November, Melkweg in Amsterdam on 20 November, La Madeleine in Brussels on 23 November, Carlswerk Victoria in Cologne on 24 November and Astra Kulturhaus in Berlin on 27 November. It is a jump of roughly two orders of magnitude from The Grace in the space of seven months.

What the support set actually looks like

The clearest account of her live setup comes from the Pale Waves run. At CHALK in Brighton on Monday 20 October 2025 — the sixth night of that tour — she went on at around half seven for a short set, accompanied by a single guitarist and lit from behind, in vintage corsetry. The songs were introduced individually, with a sentence or two each on what they were about, usually an unbalanced relationship or a version of heartbreak. The reviewer's summary was that it was catchy and danceable regardless of the subject matter, delivered with a soft but sturdy stage presence, and worth watching for.

Another write-up of the same run put it more directly: humbly vulnerable but also supremely self-assured, with early Florence Welch rawness reshaped through an electronic lens. That tension — confessional spoken introductions into songs built on programmed drums — is the shape of the set, and it is what has to carry across a room the size of the Eventim Apollo.

The side door

The direct-to-fan apparatus is more elaborate than the release schedule suggests. Her site hosts a browser game at play.emmma.co, built around the single 'Russian Roulette', in which players work through a set of relationship archetypes — ghosters, gaslighters, love bombers, players and the cheater — and unlock unreleased songs by beating them. Unreleased material as a reward for playing a game about being messed around is a neater piece of design than most debut-stage artists attempt.

Alongside it she takes addresses through the site and sends hand-written postcards, and sells signed lyric sheets rather than the usual print-on-demand tier. For an artist two EPs and a handful of singles deep, with no album announced, the emphasis is on building a small group of people who stay rather than on chart positions.