Emma Ogier: Fly 1111 Lands on Lost Highway
Emma Ogier's Fly 1111 lands twice, once as a record and once as a date. Ogier wrote the demo for the title track on November 11, and Lost Highway Records releases the finished album on November 11, 2026. She is not religious, she has said, but she is spiritual, and the number 1111 has trailed her long enough to name a record after it. The coincidence is the least strange thing about the album.
Fly 1111 is twelve songs written since 2022, produced by David Baron at his Sun Mountain studio overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir, and recorded mostly with her band and her brothers. Baron, whose credits run through Shania Twain, Lenny Kravitz, and Lana Del Rey, took Ogier under his wing when she was seventeen, and the record carries that long apprenticeship in its confidence. It is folk at its core and restless at its edges. Paste called it remarkably, delightfully strange, a battlefield strewn with pretty contradictions, and the description fits. "W2F" runs crashing, dissonant chords under a snarling chest voice. "Hands Tied," the latest single, turns falling in love into rough, riff-driven garage rock, electric guitars and drums battling for primacy over a distorted riptide.
The singles map the record's range. "Keep You" is a delicate ballad that pays homage to Joni Mitchell's "Coyote." "Rocksteady/HeavyMetal," a duet with Eden Joel released July 10, gives a post-breakup friendship its own smoldering anthem. "Baby Don't Hurt Me" passed a million Spotify streams before the album was even out. "Believing" rounds out a set of advance tracks that earned early co-signs from Clairo, Conor Oberst, Ethel Cain, and Audrey Hobert.
Ogier's road here started in her Houston bedroom, writing songs through the pandemic as a teenager. She studied at Belmont in Nashville, assisted on Dominic Fike's new single, and made her Austin City Limits debut on October 3. She spent the fall supporting Hovvdy, played Red Rocks on November 4 with Joshua Slone, and in January she joins Bright Eyes at Brooklyn Paramount. The headline shows in New York, Houston, and Nashville that follow this release are a victory lap that starts the same week as the record.
Start here
- "Hands Tied," the single, for the loudest version of what she does
- "Keep You," for the quiet one
- "Rocksteady/HeavyMetal" feat. Eden Joel, for the duet that holds the record's argument about love changing shape
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