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“What if the way I stay is always changing?” Emma Ayzenberg asks repeatedly at the opening of “count the dreams,” the closing track of her newest EP iron mountain. It’s a potent question, filled with the acknowledgement that we’re both rooted to the trunk of our history, as well as continually evolving beings, emerging and growing out from the seed of it.

The dual themes of both acceptance and transformation sit at the heart of iron mountain, Emma Ayzenberg’s follow-up to her powerful debut 2022 EP, Animus, originally released under the name Emma Ayz. The four-song EP, out January 26, 2024, was crafted in Los Angeles with a stunning lineup of musicians including both Luke Temple (Hand Habits, Allegra Krieger, Art Feynman) and Carly Bond (Meernaa) as producers, and features Greg Uhlmann (Perfume Genius, Fell Runner) on guitar, Sam Kauffman-Skloff (Angel Olsen, Miya Folick, St. Vincent) and Jorge Balbi (Sharon Van Etten, Olivia Kaplan) on drums, and Pat Kelly (Perfume Genius, St. Vincent, MARINA) on bass. The musicianship serves as the foundation for Ayzenberg’s songcraft, the vehicle through which she reflects on personal agency and resilience, exploring the realizations that have come as she’s followed a fascination for Jungian psychology, grown into her queerness, and processed both personal and generational trauma.

“My growth as a musician and person while rafting these songs felt like a very entangled, creative process,” Ayzenberg says. “I think cathartic storytelling needs time and space, just like healing does. From the lyric writing, to the sonic world building and the collaboration, I explored so many psychological themes both in terms of the actual song’s topics, and in the patience it took from me to take the songs to completion.”

But as cathartic as the process was for Ayzenberg as an individual, the resulting EP was a profoundly collaborative act. The songs emerged primarily from a songwriting class Ayzenberg took with Luke Temple in 2022, while she was working at an independent bookstore and about to release her first EP, Animus. A mutual friend connected her with Temple, and though Ayzenberg didn’t have an album’s worth of songs, she took a leap of faith, asking if he’d produce what she had the next time he was in town. Ayzenberg got a band together and they recorded the songs live over a few days. “I remember feeling really eager to collaborate, learn, and feel vulnerable,” Ayzenberg reflects. “It was a real challenge because I had never worked with a producer before, but I learned so much about myself and how to communicate my ideas in that session.”

The sense of an artist stepping into her personal power and vulnerability emanates tangibly from the songs, three of which she began with Temple and finished with Carly Bond, and one of which (“hero”) she recorded entirely with Bond in later sessions. “My guiding question for this EP was, ‘Can I push this/myself further?’” Ayzenberg says. “I knew that the songs I was writing were more direct and honest and I felt both inspired and intimidated by that. Both Luke and Carly were very supportive in helping me figure out how to lean into the emotion of the songs and portray it sonically.”

The result is a collection of songs that are at once self-assured and undefended. “If you think you can do it all, you can’t,” Ayzenberg sings unaffected and true at the opening of the EP’s title track, “iron mountain,” a nod to the English translation of her Polish last name. Throughout the song, Ayzenberg reflects on her relationship with her paternal grandfather, whose stories of Holocaust survival she grew up listening to and learning from. Alternating between these stories and her own inner monologue, Ayzenberg presents the lasting effects of trauma, both experienced and inherited. “In the last few years I’ve learned a lot about trauma, and I began to understand more about myself through understanding him.”

But Ayzenberg’s deeply personal reflections are rooted in an investment in broader and collective healing, as on “hero,” in which she sings of an anthropomorphized nature, suffering the impacts of human indifference. “When the sea rises high to trees on fire/And all our homes disappear/And there’s nowhere to run anymore/She can’t give you anymore/She’s this new kind of hero,” she sings over psychedelic phased electric guitars and swelling strings, her voice bleeding out into feedback, a rumination on the personal agency we squander while watching the world burn.

There’s a dreamlike quality to these songs, capturing that space of both confusion and clarity that exists upon waking, the images we visited still hyper-present in our mind even as we’re not yet sure which dimension we inhabit. Memory often takes the shape of dreams and nightmares, as Ayzenberg reflects in “lucile,” a song in which she processes the memories and shame of an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. “Sometimes I howl I wake to tell of a temporary numb/That still grabs me by the throat,” Ayzenberg sings flatly at the song’s opening, steely guitars sparkling beneath the rasp of her voice. But there’s profound power in speaking the unspeakable, and Ayzenberg knows this. “My body is mine whether or not you see it,” she repeats throughout the song’s choruses. “My body is mine.”

The EP culminates in “count the dreams,” a song Ayzenberg wrote in response to Temple tasking his class with writing a love song. “This was my love song to queerness,” Ayzenberg says, “and to the simultaneous joy and fear of being loved as I change and learn more about myself.” “It’s in our blood to know fear/Maybe that’s why we find pleasure between here and there,” Ayzenberg sings, naming the duality of life lived in a queer body, defined as it is by both generations of heartbreak and profound joy. Inspired by Leslie Feinberg’s seminal book Stone Butch Blues, Ayzenberg was heartened by the notion that queerness is synonymous with change, continuous and perpetual. And in understanding that there is no point in the future at which she will have arrived fully actualized, Ayzenberg has come to a place of acceptance for what is, right now, even as she tenderly welcomes the next inevitable transformation.

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