The title track of Queen of Assholes lasts two minutes and fifty-five seconds, and Cindy Emch spends most of them daring you to disagree with her. That is the Secret Emchy Society method in miniature: Bakersfield swagger, an upright bass walking hard underneath, and a singer who sounds as though she has been thrown out of better places than this. The album came out on Halloween 2025 through Yay! Agenda Records, with vinyl pressed at Third Man.
Emch has been a fixture of the East Bay's rougher country corners for a long time. Before the Society there was Rhubarb Whiskey, Vagabondage and the Oakland Wine Drinkers Union, band names that read like a bar tab. The Secret Emchy Society proper arrived with The Stars Fall Shooting Into Twangsville in 2017, recorded in Victoria, British Columbia, with Tolan McNeil producing and Carolyn Mark on piano and harmonies. McNeil stayed at the desk for The Chaser in 2020 and Gold Country / Country Gold in 2022, the album that gave the band its signature number, a cover of Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other that Emch sings as a statement of fact rather than a wink.
Queen of Assholes breaks that chain of custody. Edmond Clare of Nova Noir Productions produced, mixed and mastered it, and the recording moved home to Oakland. The core band is lean: Hans Winold on upright bass, Clinton Cleveland on electric guitar, Tommy Salami on drums, Emch on acoustic rhythm guitar and a voice that has lost none of its low-end growl. Where the McNeil records had a certain campfire generosity, tracks like Old Midwestern and Hallelujah Town push forward with the impatience of a band that has spent years in honky-tonks.
Emch's humour is the thing that keeps the aggression from curdling. Bears in the Lot and Gay Cowboys are jokes with real punchlines, sung by someone who understands that queer country has always had to be funny to survive. But the record's centre is Lavender Fields, written with Paisley Fields and dedicated to Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country, whose 1973 album was the first openly gay country record and spent decades unheard. Emch calls him her mentor and her friend, and the song, with Mya Byrne on lead guitar and Andrew Waegel's pedal steel behind Terri Upton and Carolyn Mark's harmonies, is the most tender thing she has put her name to.
That is the argument of the whole album. Hard country, in Emch's hands, is not a costume borrowed from the good old boys. It is a lineage she is claiming for the people who were told it was not theirs. Rainbow Rodeo's readers voted Queen of Assholes their album of 2025, which sounds about right for a record that starts by insulting itself and ends by honouring an elder.
