Album Premiere: 2:00AM Wake Up Call "Dead City"
There’s a quiet sort of devastation that runs through Dead City, the latest full-length from Kentucky’s own 2:00AM Wake Up Call—Emily Leith’s singular, softly collapsing indie-folk project that’s been rebuilding itself in the shadows. Following the duality of 2021's Mall Fantasy and its grimmer sibling Mall Fantasy is Dead, Dead City emerges like a rusted-out skeleton of a former life—desolate, overgrown, and oddly beautiful in its ruin.
“Dead City takes the listener on a journey through the ugliness of change and growth, walking them through the pain of loss, nostalgic desire to exist in a world that no longer exists, and acceptance that the only way to live is to continue forward one foot in front of the other until you find yourself in a better place.” - Leith
The album opens with “CD Age,” a brief but tonally significant track that immediately sets the mood. It evokes the hollowed-out warmth of a dying format, layering crackle, ambient textures, and decaying electronics like a memory that’s too degraded to fully recall. It’s not long, but it doesn’t need to be—it’s the door creaking open into a world already half-gone.
What follows is “Record to Tape,” and it's here that Dead City fully settles into its ghostly rhythm. It’s all tape hiss, gentle organ drones, and Emily’s voice—faint but insistent, like someone trying to remember something long buried. The arrangement is sparse but intentional, and the lo-fi textures feel less like a stylistic choice and more like the only language left after the fall. This is a song about memory, but more so about the loss of memory—of trying to make sense of something after the fact. It’s meditative and eerie, like walking through a childhood home that’s been gutted.
“Nightshade” deepens the album’s mood. There’s a delicate push and pull between dissonance and melody here, with soft acoustic strums tangled up in glitchy flourishes—like the folk songs Emily grew up on being corrupted by the code she used to write. Her vocals are layered like ghost echoes, never quite settling in the mix, as if she’s half-present, half-receding. It’s a song about the toxicity of beauty, about sweetness that kills slowly. The refrain hits like a warning whispered too late. Dead City isn’t a place, really—it’s a state of being. It’s the feeling of coming back to something you once loved and finding it hollowed out, or maybe realizing it was never really there in the first place. The album doesn’t build so much as it decays, piece by piece, until you’re left with just the echo of a last track, the hint of something that used to be.
For an artist who's always thrived in the liminal—between folk and glitch, human and digital, memory and myth—Emily Leith has never sounded more resolved in her uncertainty. Dead City is a quiet triumph of tone and atmosphere, a love letter to the broken, the fading, and the forgotten.
Listen to “Dead City” here
CD Age
Record to Tape
If I Could Go Back
Nightshade
Bitrot
We All Live Our Lives in Constant Pain
Composition Book [2nd single, May 27, 2025]
Paper and Pens
Dead City
Talk About the Good Old Days