“I’m just 22/ I don’t mind dying,” Erika M. Anderson sang on “California”, a smoldering tone poem off her 2011 debut Past Life Martyred Saints. She was not, in fact, 22—the line was a reference to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?”—but she delivered it in the sort of hushed-secret voice that made people assume it was confessional.

“Everyone thought that line was about me!” she laughs when I ask her about it on an unusually sunny Friday afternoon at the beginning of February. We're in the New York office of her new label, Matador, and Anderson—clad in a white shirt with a picture of Slimer from Ghostbusters hand-drawn in Sharpie (“We had a T-shirt-making party at my house,” she explains)—is still jet-lagged after flying in from Portland the night before. But she becomes noticeably animated whenever I ask her about her favorite topic of conversation: lyrics. (Hers, or anybody else’s.) “Half the time you know that people are just saying words either because they rhyme or sound good,” she says. “Like that Katy Perry song [“Roar”] that's just a bunch of horrible clichés? I mean, I was almost into it until I listened to the lyrics. So whenever people think my lyrics are confessional, I take that as a compliment because people are like, ‘She’s telling me the truth.’”

Anderson grew up in South Dakota before moving to California, where she was involved in the noise scene and played with Ezra Buchla in the drone-folk outfit Gowns. Even in the underground, she felt like an outsider. “One thing that was interesting about the [West Coast] noise scene at the time was that it was trying to break a bunch of sonic rules,” she says. “But in a lot of the places I was in, there was another rule: Lyrics are not involved. So they’d ask Ezra to play, but they wouldn’t ask me to play. ‘No sing-songy shit.’”

Past Life Martyred Saints was a personal revelation. It drew upon the influences of her past (“You were goth in high school/ ...I’ve got the same scars, you see,” she sympathized on “Butterfly Knife”) without adhering to the rules of any particular genre. Her forthcoming record, The Future’s Void, also pulls from a wide variety of influences: The second track, “So Blonde” is grunge-pop in the vein of Linda Perry, while the corrosive lead single “Satellites” is a nod to the industrial music she loved as a teen. But while Past Life Martyred Saints felt at times almost jarringly confessional, Anderson describes The Future’s Void as “more guarded.” And with good reason. Much of the record meditates on the way that the internet has altered the way we see ourselves, and considers the value of privacy in a world where we’re constantly being watched. “I don’t want to put myself out and turn it into a refrain,” she sings with weary defiance on “3Jane.” “It’s all just a big advertising campaign.”

“Guarded,” though, is a relative term with Anderson. She’s still pushing boundaries—and maybe none more forcefully than her own. “I’m not allowing people to be in a comfort zone when they listen to my lyrics,” Anderson says. “And sometimes that makes me really nervous. I’m like, 'Can I say this? Are people going to think this is really fucking lame?' But if you feel like you’re not supposed to do something, that just means you’re bumping up against a rule. And if you never examine the rules, then what’s the point?”

Pitchfork: There’s a lot of paranoia on this record. Where is that coming from?

Erika M. Anderson: I was talking to my friend about "Satellites", and he was like, "This song's almost too topical." And I was like, "Fuck! I know!" When I was writing the record, I was almost ashamed to be writing about all this shit, because no one was talking about it. This was pre-NSA, pre-Snowden, pre-Steubenville. So I didn’t set out to make a topical record that was going to be “about” the internet and surveillance, but it accidentally happened.

Pitchfork: I get the sense that you’re exploring a lot of gray areas here—you’re implicating yourself in the culture you’re critiquing.

EMA: Yeah, it's not attempting to be a didactic record or this dystopian, "the internet is bad" type of thing. It's just trying to look at the good and bad parts of it. But also, stylistically, it’s pretty pro-internet because it's so diverse. It’s me being like: “I like this, I like this, I like this.” Whereas in the past, it used to be like, “I’m into punk”; peoples' record collections had maybe one or two styles. Now they have things from every decade and genre on their iPods.

Growing up, I used to walk around in a shaved head and combat boots and people would be like, “You fucking tree hugger.” And it’s like, “How am I a tree hugger? I’m wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt.” But that’s the thing about South Dakota. All the freaks hung out together, so I got into a lot of different styles of music.

Pitchfork: In a way, the aesthetic of this record feels pro-internet, too. There’s lots of degraded digital noise, and processing on your vocals that sounds almost pixelated. Was that a particular vibe you were going for?

EMA: I just wanted some harsh tones on there. I was bringing it back to West Coast noise shows that I used to go to. I was so into that for a while that it became like, “Ugh, I never want to see this again.” But then after being on a totally different circuit [touring Past Life Martyred Saints], I was able to go back and appreciate the noise scene for what it was.

Pitchfork: A lot of scenes like that can be pretty macho. Did you meet any resistance to your music because you were a woman?

EMA: It was funny because when we moved to Oakland, some people saw a woman singing words you could understand and were like, “It’s not real!” I remember the first show we played, people were pissed because I was singing music with lyrics! That reaction scared me a little at first, but it was also kind of cool. Because these people who had invested so much of themselves into these rules—into this one idea that something is "correct"—were threatened by me in some way.

In South Dakota, I came up in a really macho scene and it made me tough. For a lot of ladies in the noise scene, the answer is to try and be even tougher than the guys, but that just wasn't me. I don't really like bad horror movies. It was really freeing when I was making Past Martyred Saints to be like, "I'm going to take take what I've learned from [noise music]—some of the concepts about space, about electronics, about structure or anti-structure—but I don't feel the need to follow these rules forever." It's actually really good that I was not accepted, because I was like, "Fuck this, why am I going to bother to be part of this thing that is already rejecting me and I don't even think is that cool?"

Pitchfork: Like Martyred Saints, you recorded all of The Future’s Void at home. At some point do you think you’ll record in a studio?

EMA: I am still not ready for that. I got help mixing the new record, and even that was really scary. I sat by that person the entire time and was like, "I don't know, man. Let's try some Tremulator on it. Turn down that 5K. There's too much compression on this." I needed to walk away and stop micromanaging. I can see why people go into a studio, but I just can’t. That’s probably why it takes me so much longer to do everything.

But also, the way I write, I like to have it available to me. Like, with “Dead Celebrity”, I just went downstairs one day, wrote it, played it. A lot of the stuff on the record is one of the first few takes. There's good and bad with that. I like it because it has a certain spontaneity, but then people who are playing with me are just like, "Why isn't this on a click track? Can we do this again? Your timing is crazy." And I'll flub a word, it'll be off pitch. I like that.