When you’re the singer in one of heavy music’s most exciting emerging bands operating right now, eventually the icons come calling.
It was May 2025, and Dying Wish singer Emma Boster had just come off stage after a triumphant gig supporting Spiritbox in LA when she heard a childhood hero was in her midst. Amy Lee had come to see Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante, but the Evanescence frontwoman also had a surprise request.
“I'm literally packing all my stuff and getting ready to leave the venue, and Courtney texted me and she's like, ‘Amy wants to meet you,’” says Emma, who later uploaded the photographic evidence, a picture with Amy and Courtney, to Instagram. “She's the epitome of a rad person.”
When Hammer first met Emma in 2021, the band had just released their debut record, Fragments Of A Bitter Memory, and were making a name for themselves on the live circuit. Since then, the Portland, Oregon five-piece have had a whirlwind few years. They’ve collaborated with Knocked Loose and toured with everyone from Limp Bizkit to Poppy and Spiritbox. They’ve just dropped their third album, Flesh Stays Together, which Emma says is their most “spiteful” yet.
“We never expected any of this to happen,” she says over Zoom, dialling in from backstage at The Old National Centre in Indianapolis, where the band are supporting Poppy tonight. Dressed in a black sweater, and oversized Y2K yellow-lens sunglasses, her ice-blonde hair pops against painted green walls. “We’re navigating it as we go.”
Indeed, things are so busy right now that Emma, who married The Devil Wears Prada guitarist and singer Jeremy DePoyster in September, hasn’t been able to fit in her own honeymoon yet. It’s a harsh reality of two people whose jobs require them to be perpetually on the road.
“The wait will be worth it,” she smiles. “When we're together, we forget that we do what we do, and we're just ourselves with the identity of the bands stripped away.”
Dying Wish formed out of logistical necessity. Emma had got into hardcore in her early teens after attending a show by righteous San Francisco punk band Punch at a bookstore in her native Portland when she was 15. That soon escalated into an interest in putting on shows of her own, but she hit an immediate roadblock.
“There were no local bands,” she remembers. “Portland doesn't have that issue anymore, the youth are really crushing it. But at the time, there wasn't a whole lot.”
Emma needed an opening band, so she created one. Recruiting a couple of kids she knew from middle school, guitarist Pedro Carrillo and drummer Jeff Yambra, she put together Trust Issues, releasing an EP, 2017’s Finding Peace In Darkness. They changed their name to Dying Wish the following year, and a split EP with Canadian metalcore band Serration followed in 2019.
That would be the year things went into hyperspeed. Not only did they supporting Counterparts on a US run, they received an offer that changed the trajectory of their career. Emma was working at Portland venue, the Hawthorn Theater, when she received an Instagram DM from Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris, inviting her to guest on the track, A Serpent’s Touch, a song on the band’s second album, A Different Shade Of Blue. She may have recorded her vocals for the track on a MacBook in a closet at a friend’s house, but it would be a turning point.
“A friend of mine had taken a screenshot of how many Instagram followers I had before the track came out, and I had less than 2,000 followers,” she says. “I can't remember the exact number it jumped to, but it was instant. As a band, and as a scene, we owe a lot to Knocked Loose because of how they've really pioneered their own path and made hardcore so accessible and so inclusive to everybody.”
Dying Wish – whose line-up is completed by guitarist Sam Reynolds and bassist Jon Mackey – have continued to make friends in high places. In 2022, the band headed out on the road with Limp Bizkit, handpicked as support by frontman Fred Durst. He discovered them on Tik Tok.
“One day he sat down with us at catering, and we had lunch together,” says Emma. “We had one video go pretty viral from a small show we did at the Midnight Hour in LA in 2021. I went back and found the video, and he had commented on it like, ‘Whoa, this is sick.’ He’s got a really good vibe.”
Emma has viewed every tour as an opportunity. Having blown her voice out on an early tour, the result of a lack of technique at the time, she’s always in student mode, watching and improving on the craft. The band’s recent stint with Spiritbox was a masterclass.
“I learned so much from Courtney,” she enthuses. “I think it's even so simple as her posture. I started trying to have better posture when I scream, and it helps.”
Channelling hardcore, metalcore and melodeath, Flesh Stays Together tempers its extremity with moments of bleak but beautiful melody. While the band have experimented with more clean singing than ever, it does nothing to dull the record’s bile.
Onstage, Emma is a rabid presence. Offstage she’s friendly and open. As a singer and performer, she’s a potent blend of the two, a hard-edged vulnerability which allows her to write raw lyrics that provide a powerful voice for others, as well as a means to process her own experiences.
Growing up in a liberal family, her mother and grandmother politically-engaged feminists who despised the Republican Party, she was introduced to politics early on.
“That's part of what I love about my home city,” she grins. “There's always some unrest going on.”
In 2020, she was detained by police for resisting arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland. “Honestly, they were trying to arrest anybody that was there,” she shrugs. “I don't have a criminal record, so nothing stuck.”
Activism is an important part of her identity, but with Dying Wish constantly on the road, she doesn’t get the opportunity to get involved as much as she used to. Instead, the band is a vital platform to amplify the issues that are important to her, as well as opening up about her own childhood, growing up with an abusive, alcoholic stepfather.
“I haven't had a relationship with my biological father for basically my whole life, which is fine,” she says. “But in the process of writing this record, I have healed a lot. On [2023’s second album] Symptoms Of Survival, I was pretty much over it. Then you go through the process of writing another record, and I had to reckon with some things that I had not addressed before, within myself.”
I would spend an entire tour getting hammered and then wonder why I wanted to unalive myself
Emma Boster
Songs like Nothing Like You and Moments I Regret see Emma open up about her own struggle with alcohol, including the lyrics: “Unloved since birth/My father’s curse...”
“It’s how I have inherited that from my family, how it's taken a toll on me mentally, and how it's changed the way that I feel about myself,” she says. “I don't really drink on tour like I used to. Before, I would spend an entire tour getting hammered and then wonder why I wanted to unalive myself. It's been a struggle of taking sobriety breaks here and there and really making sure that I have it under control.”
Flesh Stays Together is the first Dying Wish album she’s recorded sober. “That felt really good. And I think that that really helped me dig into some deeper stuff instead of numbing the pain because I know that I have used alcohol as a coping mechanism. What I've been working on is, let's do it for fun occasionally in a social setting, and not to blur the things that I don't want to deal with.”
The opening track on the album, I Don’t Belong Anywhere, is perhaps the most personal. Simply existing in a world that, more than ever, seems to be brimming with hate, is a challenge. It’s depicted by the album’s cover art: Emma with a plastic bag over her head gasping for air.
“People don’t want this band to exist,” she says simply. “I am a queer person. We have people of colour in the band. And then people want to pigeonhole us because there's a woman in the band. But I just want to be a musician. I don't want to be framed as this gimmick.”
She calls I Don’t Belong Anywhere, a “fuck you” to anyone who seeks to “take away our rights and strip away our identities: “Hate what you don't understand/ I am defiance/ Shoved down your throats.”
“I think that the record comes from a really negative, nihilistic place,” Emma says. “I'm not a negative, nihilistic person. But we have talked a lot about how art is uncomfortable and not to censor it. I do think that I did feel a little hopeless when I first heard the record. But when I listen to it now, I don't feel hopeless. I just think, ‘Wow, this is a wakeup call.’”
Flesh Stays Together is out now via SharpTone
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