Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton is a singer-songwriter project led by Emily Haines, frontwoman of Canadian indie rock band Metric and member of Broken Social Scene. With the Soft Skeleton, she collaborates with a circle of fellow musicians and producers.

The project debuted in 2006 with the album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and followed up in 2007 with the EP What Is Free to a Good Home? A decade later, sophomore album Choir of the Mind was released.

Vocals and piano from Haines lead most of the music, with occasional rock and chamber orchestra accompaniment. In an interview with About.com, she has defined her music with the Soft Skeleton as “a body of work that was dealing with a whole whack of themes that really weren’t suited to Metric.”

Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork characterizes the project’s debut as ”a sobering meditation on modern melancholy,” stemming from Haines’s personal vulnerabilities that she discusses in the music. Allmusic’s Stewart Mason goes on to compare her musicianship to the solo work of progressive rock songwriter Robert Wyatt, in how she “marries a sharp social conscience” with “a tendency toward elegiac, unhurried melodies.”