You would know her as a member of Christchurch rock band Decades, however, Emma Cameron has another string to her musical bow as a solo artist. Under the name Emma Dilemma she has been drip-releasing singles, the latest of which, New Attraction, is an eclectic fusion of rock, disco and pop. 

“I don’t really stick to a certain genre. I like a lot of different types of music. This song just lent itself to the sounds that it has, just the riff and the content and the feel, it just fell out as a kind of disco-rock track.

“A lot of my new music was intended for Decades next album. But I kind of got through the recording and writing process and I said to the guys I think this is not Decades at all, would you mind if I just went over here for a bit? And they were like yeah that’s fine.” 

Cameron had the riff to New Attraction lying around for months, and on one occasion playing around on Ableton she added a beat to it and the song then quickly took shape. “I melodically started following the guitar riff and then words started falling out.”

She drew on the experience of Melbourne-based electronic duo Le Sauvage to help produce and perfect the track. Made up of Alex Markwell and Harley Webster, Cameron says the duo were the right people to get the genre fusion sound she desired.

“I need these guys to produce all my music with me because they kind of get how I like pop music, but that I also like grunge rock from the ’90s. I love dance music, hip hop and RnB, and they are just the perfect duo to fuse it all together with basically.” 

As Cameron explains, the song is about being single even though she is not single herself.

“It turned into this story about being single and wanting to go out clubbing, thinking you are going to be single for a really long time, you are going to be looking after yourself, and then making eye contact with someone across the room and being like, ‘Oh damn, here we go, I am falling in love again.’”

Although you would assume New Attraction would form part of an album release for Cameron, she has other ideas and is going about things slightly differently.

“I feel like the album format is a bit dead with streaming culture basically. I really want to release every single song that I have, which is an album’s worth, there are 11 songs, but I want to release them as their own tracks with videos. 

“In this streaming culture, you never know what song is going to hit what audience, and if it is going to work or not. I just didn’t want to put all my eggs in the one basket of the traditional format of pick three singles and then release a 12-track album into the abyss, and no one cares. There will be a solid album available, but I am releasing all the songs as singles leading up to that.”