Natalie Lew grew up by the ocean, always harboring a fascination with the strange universes bubbling right below the surface. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest (she currently resides in Seattle), the peculiar and miraculous environment around her, filled with tide pools and marine life, has seeped into her worldview and the music she makes as Sea Lemon. Imbued by both a sense of wonder and trepidation, debut full length Diving For A Prize is a haunting vision of Lew’s own creation, a vividly assembled snapshot of a place that is both fantastical and deeply curious.
The result of eight months of writing, Diving For A Prize was mainly produced and fleshed out in the studio with Lew’s collaborator Andy Park (Death Cab For Cutie, Deftones) in Park’s home studio in Seattle. Lew herself grew up playing piano, but became more actively engaged with music when she joined the programming board of her college at the University of Washington where she was studying design. Always consuming new music, it wasn’t until a stint in New York where she picked up a guitar for the first time, briefly joining a band with her roommates before moving back to the West Coast in 2020. This newfound period of isolation allowed her to experiment with Logic and create music on her own. “I never heard myself sing until 2020,” she admits. The resulting EPs Close Up and Stop At Nothing represent these first forays as a solo musician, but although Lew has always highlighted the intentional departure between the sonic semi-brightness of her music and its darker subject matter, Diving For A Prize fully submerges into fuzzier territory and murkier impulses.
“When I make a song I think of it as its own little universe,” Lew explains. Inspired by artists like Enya, Caroline Palochek, Air and My Bloody Valentine, Lew’s “shoegaze but with pop structures” songs have a knack to be earworm-y when you least expect it, embedding themselves in the listener’s psyche. Intentionally amorphous, often what seems like a straightforward chord progression dissolves into something more insidious after multiple listens. Her voice can sound sweetly saccharine until you listen to the lyrics, which often tell vaguely sinister tales and reflect scenes where the mundane takes a turn. Lew writes short stories in her spare time, and her eye for curious vignettes is reflected in Diving For A Prize, which often sees her characters going through minute challenges or uncomfortable scenarios, like in the disarmingly ominous “Rear View,” which features a baseball player who is on the periphery of not making the next season. For this is what life is like – “tragic, sweet, comedic,” Lew says: all of the things at once.
As much as Lew excels as a storyteller, she at the same time warns against hinging too much on one person’s version of events. She’s her own unreliable narrator, blinded by emotion and the fleeting memory of the moment. It’s prevalent in the eerie naiveté of the otherwise dreamily cloying “Sweet Anecdote”: “you were the one / knew from the start / God I was so sure when I saw you.” Just as songs fossilize and preserve a specific feeling, time ushers on the inevitability of change. Lew often imagines what has become of these people. “Stay,” which memorializes an old security guard asleep in a thrift store, lends melodrama and cinema to the idea of the man finally leaving work and never coming back: a happy, albeit imagined ending.
The twelve songs of the album often operate in this sphere between fantasy and real life, where it is easy to dream, almost desperately, that something out of the ordinary might occur, even if it means ignoring your gut instinct. Lew reiterates this in the gleaming “Blue Moon,” which signifies “nature giving you signs that you should stop doing something,” while in the heavier “Give In,” she paints a scene where the light of an abandoned house draws the listener in. The name Diving For A Prize signifies taking this leap, often with the clouded judgment and despite the clues and warning signs that suggest otherwise. Lew has long been enamored by the horror trope of a fork in the road, and the presiding obsession that comes from wanting to make something, anything happen, at any cost.
But part of risk is also reward, and each track is its own portal filled with both yearning and self discovery. The luminescent “Silver,” which is about “being a kid and my mom telling me the world is your oyster,” holds both this disillusionment as well as hope that comes with growing into the person you are. It’s this constant desire for more which pushes us forward, towards whatever destiny awaits us. “With these songs, I wanted to find a place for myself in the world.”
