Hands in the soil: Pem digs deep into the roots of her new EP, ‘other ways of landing’
Editor’s Note: For 2026, Far Out didn’t just want to recommend ones to watch, we wanted to stick with them. Selecting five artists set for greatness – spotlighting Pem, ELLiS-D, Jeanie and the White Boys, Camille Schmidt and Imogen and the Knife – our Class of 2026 spans genres and countries to back the best of the rising stars. In a series of repeat conversations pairing each act with a writer, we’ll be checking in with them throughout the year, tracking the highs, lows, trials and triumphs of the talent we believe in. For their first check-in, Reuben Cross spoke with Pem about her early doors 2026 release.
Given how the relentless cycle of releasing music tends to work in the modern age, it’s hard for artists to think about how best to kick-start a new year when their work is often done with a view to something happening months in advance.
For Emily Perry, aka Pem, the release of her third EP, the spellbinding other ways of landing, isn’t a bad way of starting things – but this release has been in the pipeline for some time now, and so the artist is already looking forward. As one of Far Out’s Class of 2026 spotlight artists, the indication is there that there’s plenty more to come from this remarkable songwriting talent in the remaining 11 months.
“I’ve decided to start the year by really honing in on my craft as a musician,” Perry says, as though the outstanding display of her craft on her new EP is something that she’s still intent on improving. “I started this little internal programme about creativity and finding ways to enhance that. I started getting more tuition with my instruments, and I’m learning how to do a lot more of the recording and stuff myself.”
It’s certainly admirable that someone who already seems so assured in her songwriting from an outside perspective is setting herself targets to fine-tune an already impeccable process. “I wanted to start this year with a bit of impetus behind development,” she adds. “I think I’ve always written in a way that’s quite whimsical, and it’s this cathartic process which I love, but I think I’m starting to see myself more as more than just a singer-songwriter. I guess a nice way to start the year is not so much of a goal to set myself, but a new part of me that I want to experiment with and enhance.”
Of course, releasing other ways of landing at the start of the year is still a positive way to kick things into gear, despite it being almost a year to the day since she began on her journey of developing it. In Perry’s eyes, the fact that it has achieved this full-circle moment of starting development in the thick of the winter months of 2025 and been birthed into the world 12 months on is a poetic way of underlining the key themes behind the record.
“I see it as a seasonal EP,” she muses. “I wasn’t writing it at the time, consciously saying ‘this is autumn, and this one spring’, I just noticed that the first song on the EP was written in January, and then the last song was much later on, near Harvest Moon.”
While the record took shape over the course of several months, many of the songs found themselves coming to life in a live environment, where she used her band as a means of fleshing out arrangements. “Generally, I’ve got a real idea before we go into the studio,” she explains, “and then Ali [Chant, her producer] helps bring that together. I’ll go in like, ‘This is the part for this, these are the voices, these are the field recordings I want to manipulate and distort.’”
Her relationship with Chant, who also runs Pem’s home label, Fascination Street Records, extends back to his work on her 2024 EP, cloud work, and the result of this continued collaboration has led to there being an intrinsic understanding of each other’s methods. While Chant’s touches are still crucial to animating Perry’s artistic vision, she insists that the lighter the production, the better.
“I wouldn’t want to have a sound on record that I wasn’t able to do live,” she explains. “It’s really important to me to capture the intimacy and the delicateness, where the small parts sound really small, and the big parts sound really big.” At times, paring the arrangements back has led to her not knowing when a song is complete, and found herself relying on gut instinct to assess whether anything more can be done or if something needs removing.
“There’s some songs that I will trundle my way through, and it won’t feel right even though I’m trying so many different things, probably to my detriment,” she later admits. “Then there are other songs where I’ll just have this sense that it’s done and I don’t need to add anything to it. I think ‘milk, blue’ is a really good example of that, because I wrote that in half an hour, and other than a word or two, it didn’t change after that. Just before we were supposed to go into the studio, I suddenly said ‘I think I have another song’ and then sent over a voice recording to Ali. As a person, I’m very feeling-based.”
“I love autumn because you’re cutting back for everything to sleep for a while, then obviously spring, when little buds start growing”, Pem muses, still ascribing that feeling-first view of the world when we begin talking about her other role. Outside of music, she works as a professional gardener, but more and more, those two jobs merge.
“The more experienced I’ve become as a gardener, the more they complement each other,” she reflects, noting how both music and gardening are their own form of artistry. “The more confidence I’ve had in both of them, they both really work together and inform each other. I couldn’t just do gardening, because I’d need to have this element of performance, but then I don’t think I could just do performance and music, because I need the gardening side of things to ground me.”
As a passion, gardening and getting outside as a form of therapy sits up there alongside music. It’s something she’s keen to encourage others to seek out, stating, “Having trained a bit in the therapeutic world, and having had a lot of therapy myself, I find gardening very therapeutic,” before launching into a persuasive advertisement for its benefits.
“Having your hands in soil and being in the cycles of nature are really important, and in contemporary society, we don’t have a lot of that. I think it’s just something that we should be encouraged to do more, although I know it’s not accessible for everyone.” She does, however, note that it’s not as glamorous as it can seem. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not always that idyllic. I’m always covered in mud, dragging bags of mulch around and getting thorns everywhere. But a lot of the time, I come home feeling quite fulfilled, and I know that I’ve engaged with something that’s not a computer.”
As mentioned, though, music and mud have been merging more. Despite wanting to use the garden as a means of distracting herself from screens, the phone in her pocket has become a vital instrument, still with her out in the weeds. “I now have 4500 voice notes,” she laughs, realising how this obsession with capturing sounds to use in songs has spiralled into an instinctive process. “I love that it shows the GPS of your location, and I love the collection of different names.”
Speaking about some of the field recordings that found their way onto other ways of landing, she notes that the garden has almost become an additional musician on the record. “Most of the samples are all from generally being outside or playing with bits of metal,” she explains. “There’s lots of recorded sounds of wind in there, and leaf rustlings and trees in the wind, then some of me banging instruments and tools, or the sound of a wheelbarrow moving. Previously, it was a lot of bird songs. I wanted to put some of that in this time, but I did that so much on the last EP.”
The balance of moving forward from her last EP while still acknowledging the significance of its themes was something on her mind. Written in the wake of her father’s passing, large amounts of the 2024 EP dealt with the immediate grief, and even though she has attempted to find a sense of normality following such a life-changing event, she hopes that the new release can still resonate with listeners in a different way.
“I think on this record, it’s still woven in there, but it’s a bit more abstract, which I think kind of speaks to my process of grief as a whole,” she notes, explaining how the two records still exist as snapshots of her processing this trauma. “I hope that if anyone can get anything from this body of work, it’s that there’s cycles of change, and that that’s a good thing. There are these really horrible patches, and these really terrifying things can happen, but things do grow again, and you can spread a couple branches out.”
It was while dealing with grief that Perry leaned into her love of the outdoors further, and eventually found the inspiration for the title, other ways of landing, from something she noticed in her mum’s garden in Berkshire. “I saw a tiny oak seedling that was trying to grow in a crack between concrete,” she recalls of the moment the title came to her. “I remember thinking that the idea of something as massive as an oak tree trying to grow in the most impossible place was interesting.”
Drawing further comparisons between her previous record and her most recent offering, she explained how more fantastical things and metaphors help Perry gain tangible explanations for her place in the world. “I think the main themes of cloud work were about flight and water and birds; metaphors for grief,” she notes. “For this EP, a lot of it was to do with gardening, but I’m really into astronomy, space and the moon, and thinking about these giant forces that are so hard to get your head around.”
She continues, elaborating on the idea that the grandness of the world around poses important philosophical questions. “Everything’s operating in a way that we can’t fully understand and we have no control over, and that’s a terrifying but quite beautiful thing,” she adds. “I was boiling that down to being in a garden and watching things change over time, and those became symbols of looking at relationships and my day to day in the context of all these massive things and how insignificant I am; how sad that is, but also how lovely that is.”
While 2025 was an incredible year for Pem, with her and her band embarking on multiple support tours alongside the likes of Mercury-nominated folk singer Jacob Alon and fast-rising indie rocker jasmine.4.t, the new year will bring an even greater challenge in the sense that she’ll be heading on tour as a headline act for the first time. “I only came to perform live as cloud work came out,” she reminds me, almost staggered by how rapidly she’s grown in stature. “People asked why I was doing so many support tours, and it was because I felt like I didn’t have loads of shows under my belt.”
Despite the constant graft, Perry has still found time to explore new music that is inspiring her, with not just her tourmates providing inspiration, but other sources opening her ears to new ideas. “There’s an artist called FLOCO who’s based in London,” she tells me. “She makes really beautiful soundscapes and very atmospheric songs that I’ve been enjoying, such as ‘Like the soil’. I’ve also been digging into Joanne Robertson’s Blurrr album from 2025 as well, that’s gorgeous.”
As for her schedule moving into the first half of 2026, things are already looking busy. “We’re playing a festival in Ireland called Borderline in February, and then starting the tour in March,” she says; the excitement for which is palpable. “We’re supporting Black Box Recorder at the London Palladium in May, which will be really fun. It’s their first show in 17 years, and the whole thing’s just quite crazy. There’s another festival in Salford in May, and then I guess some more things over summer.”
“The whole thing’s quite crazy” seems to be an apt description of how Pem has burst into life over the course of the past couple of years, and while Perry appears to have remained unfazed by it all and cherishing every moment, it’s certain that she’ll have to brace herself for a further wave of hype and attention, with her work only seeming to get stronger with every release.
