When a standalone guitar riff meets you at the door, it’s time to welcome in the pure, unadulterated emotion it brings. In this case, it’s Canadian artist Emily Molloy and her raw and emotional new single, “Wide Awake”, and her new EP, Catastrophes – available now.

A fixture in the West Coast independent music community, Vancouver’s Emily Molloy is a trio of talent. From exciting and enduring songwriting, to her flawless performance and powerful voice, to her captivating on-screen and on-stage visuals, Molloy employs a host of truths in the notes she writes and performs.

In addition, his commitment to telling the whole story leaves the listener the opportunity to identify himself; her authenticity gives credit to her lyrics and she captivates audiences by bringing comfort in understanding with her songs.

This very notion is exposed loud and clear in Molloy’s latest offering, “Wide Awake”, a song about grief, about resolve, about the anguish of accepting lost love.

Written in less than an hour, Molloy was emboldened by a split experienced by award-winning director Angie Nolan. Finding perspective through Nolan’s pain, Molloy packs every emotional punch with his harsh, full-bodied vox; each resolution in the lyrics is a little more painful than the last until it climbs the note so loud in the bridge that you can feel in your soul the breaking of its heart. Molloy perfectly embodies a wailing wall of grief and sadness all at once.

“After writing ‘Wide Awake’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wait… I’m not going to experience this myself, but Angie is,'” she recalls. “I realized that I wrote the song about her, and from her perspective, but that we can all relate to.”

Enlisting sound engineer Eric Mosher at Warehouse Studios in 2020, Molloy quickly realized that “Wide Awake” was the flagship track of his latest EP. “This is my most vulnerable song recorded to date, and I knew I needed a video that would fully capture the story and the emotion expressed. The song turned out to be more beautifully breathtaking in the studio than I never would have hoped, and she screamed for her visual match.

After dreaming about the storyboard for the clip and with Angie Nolan directing the production, “Wide Awake” premiered in August 2021. A wintry landscape following Molloy wandering through the woods as a healing warrior dances on a frozen lake , the video captures the stifling of loss, but the empowerment to let go and accept the freedom of grief.

“Because for some reason I dreamed of a wintry landscape, we filmed the video in Whistler on Alta Lake while it was frozen,” says Molloy. “Jenna Manzanares played the role of the healed / warrior version of myself beautifully. Strong and incredibly powerful, she dances in the open and liberating expanse (while I’m still stuck in the woods).

“I’m both incredibly honored and proud that such an incredibly talented person is showing off their talent in this clip, he’s a creepy star. Jenna was on the ice in a spandex bodysuit for hours, freezing her buttocks without complaint. At the same time, I was putting on makeup, ignoring the impending cold. Jenna and I ended up lying in puddles of ice on a frozen lake for hours with very little clothing.

“The emotion seen and felt in the video is 100% authentic,” continues Molloy. “I’ve never played before, and this experience gave me a new perspective on what it means to be a performer. I cry, for real, in the video. I really get the feelings in the video.

The spectator will tell. The listener will understand. The lingering electric guitar only fills the void behind Molloy’s incredibly formidable voice; it does not need any instrumentation to find the melody in the music. Emily Molloy’s voice shines like a beacon above the backdrop. You believe every word. You are every word.

“Over time, I feel like this song is not only linked to my life, but that it is linked to so many others,” recalls Emily Molloy. “We all suffer from injury, trauma and pain; but learning to channel this energy into creative expression of any form helps transform that trauma into beauty.

Open your eyes to see beyond heartache. Emily Molloy challenges you to be “wide awake”.

“Wide Awake” and Catastrophes are available now.