Sing out, Sister

Like a domino effect in the room, people snap to attention. Suddenly, everyone is wondering the same thing: Who is that ginger-haired woman — and where can I hear more?

Emmet performs as Mr. Sister, whose dark-hearted songs sound like they could have been released yesterday or nearly 60 years ago on Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.’’ There’s always been one problem, though. With no album and just a handful of live recordings posted on her MySpace page, Emmet’s music has never resonated beyond the venues she plays.

Emmet is hoping that will change now that she’s releasing Mr. Sister’s debut album, “O, Sinister Force,’’ which she will celebrate with a show Sunday night at Great Scott in Allston. (The album is already available on iTunes.)

Given how much attention her voice commands, it’s odd to hear how Emmet, 25, has had to come to terms with it over the years.

“Nobody really liked my singing back then,’’ she says, sitting cross-legged in the Arnold Arboretum recently, not far from the home in Jamaica Plain she shares with her husband. “You can try to sound normal, but normal is still trying to sound like something. I think my voice has always been sort of different. I tried making it sound pretty, but it just sounded bad. It didn’t fit.’’

She eventually realized it didn’t need to fit in any particular hole. Her voice has become an asset, even the centerpiece on “O, Sinister Force,’’ which Emmet recorded over the past year at the Soul Shop in Medford.

“The whole record is clearly about her voice,’’ says Elio DeLuca, who plays in Hallelujah the Hills and coproduced the album with Emmet. “We crafted the sound around it because I think the most striking thing about her music is her voice, the way she gets those lyrics across.’’

The Soul Shop puts a premium on analog recording and production, and the warm, weathered sound suits Emmet’s aesthetic. You can literally hear the starkness of the studio and how Emmet’s voice bounces off the walls. DeLuca compares her to Anita O’Day, the great jazz singer who had a gift for elusive phrasing and delivery.

Like O’Day, Emmet is keenly aware of how the words and melodies interact with her voice. Her style, with echoes of Karen Dalton, was already in place when someone suggested she listen to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, otherworldly singers Emmet could relate to.

Emmet admits she took a crooked road to finding her way in music, starting the band while in college and going by different names. (Dogs and Trains didn’t have quite the same ring as Mr. Sister.) She grew up in Townsend in a big family, one of six children, a few of whom also gravitated toward music. In fourth grade, she took up trombone in the school band before later moving on to guitar, banjo, and accordion.

Before her music career took off, Emmet was already pursuing art, specializing in oil painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She draws inspiration from old photographs from her childhood, except her paintings are never linear interpretations of the pictures or the memories they invoke. They’re often grotesque approximations, shrouded in mystique but compelling nonetheless.

Emmet takes a similar approach to her songwriting. Her imagery — about nature, animals, and, lately, body parts — tends to be visceral, close to the bone. The lyrics to “Wisconsin’’ jar you out of the song’s majestic accompaniment: “Wisconsin is far too cold / And this racehorse is far too old / Let’s shoot it in the head / It’s too dull to be bred / And it’s eating us out of house and home.’’

Like Neko Case, whose songwriting she admires, Emmet prizes mystery and abstraction in her lyrics.

“I feel like with my music there’s a feeling I try to convey by how the song sounds and the words I use,’’ she says. “I think I repress a lot of stuff. I write the songs, and the feeling is there, but I forget what’s behind them. Lately my songs are becoming more like metaphors. Nothing is spelled out anymore. Or maybe it’s even less spelled out for me.’’

A good example is “The Pest,’’ a folk dirge with gospel overtones that often closes her live shows. She performs the song a cappella, usually with Mike Fiore, her frequent duet partner who also fronts the band Faces on Film. They make a striking pair; she’s the leather to his lace.

“I feel like he sings my songs with a gentle tenderness that sounds good with my abrasiveness,’’ Emmet says, a notion that’s never occurred to Fiore.

“I’ve definitely never thought about it as tenderness versus harshness,’’ Fiore says later. “More than anything else, I think she sings with a lot of confidence. She has very strong ideas about how her music should be. Anybody who has strong beliefs like that, I think it comes across in their performance.’’

He also relates to Emmet’s tendency to write songs that are as much about mood as meaning.

“I think we both enjoy existing in some kind of place where it’s not necessary to be firmly planted in the storytelling,’’ Fiore says. “She’s comfortable with the first layer of reality being chipped away. People not immediately understanding what she’s writing about is a byproduct rather than the purpose.’’

That’s a reality Emmet will have to face now that more people are able to hear her music. It feels appropriate that as Mr. Sister is coming into focus, so is Emmet’s confidence that she’s finally where she wants to be — naysayers be damned.

“I had just finished recording my album a while ago, so I was playing it in the coffeeshop where I work to hear the mixes on the stereo,’’ she says. “Some customers came and in and said, ‘What is this? It sounds like dying cats!’ ’’

As she recounts the story, Emmet looks sheepish before lifting her head to explain how she answered their question. “I said, ‘It’s me.’ ’’

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.