Emmy the Great's fourth solo album, April, was heavily influenced by a trip to her childhood home of Hong Kong during Mid-Autumn Festival in 2017. Though working on an album was part of her plan for the time off, she also explored the city streets and felt an unexpected connection to its ongoing issues with identity, and to her native Cantonese. (Her family moved from Hong Kong to the U.K. when she was 11, and she was based in New York prior to the trip.) Emmy recorded the album in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in February 2018 with friends including backing bandmember Dani Markham, who co-produced April with Beatriz Artola (Kendrick Lamar, Fleet Foxes). Capturing a specific time in her life as well as a period of calm preceding political unrest in Hong Kong, the good-natured album was held for release until late 2020 to allow for a maternity leave.
It begins with the brief scene-setter "Mid-Autumn," which opens with distant, crescendo'ing strings and layered whispers before a simple, sung tune enters behind a spoken introduction in Cantonese. The album soon settles into spacious, lyrical songs like the self-referencing "Writer" and "Chang-E." Relying, like much of the album, on keyboard, strings, and percussion for its soft-spoken arrangement, the gently playful, theatrical "Chang-E" opens with the lines "There's more to life than New York City/As I climb ten thousand steps up to the temple/I begin to believe that this journey/Would be easier if I wasn't so literal." Continuing the travelog, "A Window/O'Keeffe" recalls an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, and songs like "Okinawa/Ubud" and "Hollywood Road/April" grapple with realizations tied to place. An album with a generally warm, affectionate mood, the latter track draws on classic shoop-shoop pop-soul. Throughout what is also an evocative set, Emmy the Great conjures images of musician-studded street corners and windblown flower petals alongside characters like "Mary," the unreliable fortune teller. With an "adios to all of that," the forward-charging "Heart Sutra" closes April, which was completed just weeks before the songwriter relocated to Hong Kong.