As Sea Lemon, Seattle’s Natalie Lew crafts outwardly bubbly dream pop underlined by a subtle snarl. This sound is at its finest on her new EP, Stop At Nothing, announced today, to be released August 25 on Luminelle Recordings. Lew’s latest single, “Vaporized,” finds her formula at its peppiest. Springy and uptempo, the summery song is carried by jangling guitars and reverb-drenched vocals that come together to evoke acts like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Launder. “Vaporized” is accompanied by an ominous, campy video, filmed around Seattle, directed by Otium + Lew herself. The track follows recently-released shoegazey single, “Cellar.”
On the track, Lew offers: “”Vaporized” was the first song I wrote that I knew specifically would be for the new EP. The song is all about my personal health anxieties and fear of death, which is something I’ve dealt with since I was little. The chorus’ “I thought he was buried alive/out of my mind/I thought she was vaporized/out of my mind” is playing on the most unlikely, almost impossible ways to die because I think making light of my personal anxieties can help me from spiraling. I have insomnia a lot and wake up in the middle of the night, and used to have this tendency to read headlines while I was awake (a terrible idea), wondering if some horrible accident might happen to me too. The song instrumentally gets a little heavier and more intense each chorus, which implies this impending doom feeling that gets worse and worse as I worry.”
On the video: “Alex (Otium) and I shot the video over a weekend in Seattle this summer. In the video, I’m playing two characters—an unknowing protagonist that’s been allured to dark magic, and the allurer, who is this mysterious other character in a nightgown, red gloves and a mask. The song and video as a whole are meant to represent how uncomfortable it is confronting one’s fear of the unknown, and the video pulls on these classic, campy thriller movie tropes that remind me of being a kid and watching the old VHS player in my playroom. I wanted to step out of my own comfort zone with this video, and do something a little more conceptual and weirder that felt like an honest depiction of Vaporized core themes.”
All her life, Natalie Lew had been a music fan, but she never envisioned herself gracing the stage as a musician. Growing up in Seattle, Lew was raised on local cultural touchstones like the Capitol Hill Block Party, KEXP, and the Museum of Pop Culture’s annual Sound Off (Battle of the Bands), which led her to believe she’d pursue a career working for a label, maybe as an A&R rep, anything to keep in close proximity with the thing she loved most. Though Lew grew up playing the piano, that was the extent of her musical prowess, at least until she moved to New York and started playing a roommate’s guitars, which led to playing rhythm guitar in a friend’s band. The experience opened up a new future for Lew who returned to the Pacific Northwest in the early days of the pandemic and, in isolation, wrote her very first songs which were released as an EP, Close Up, in 2022 under the moniker Sea Lemon in homage to the acid-yellow sea slugs who populate the waters of the Puget Sound.
Now signed to Luminelle, Sea Lemon will debut a new EP, Stop at Nothing, on August 25, 2023. While Close Up was what Lew calls a “grab bag” of tracks she’d made while figuring out her unique sound, Stop at Nothing establishes Sea Lemon’s take on the dreampop aesthetics she grew up loving. “I call it Costco Cocteau Twins,” Lew says. “It’s a modern spin on classic dreampop and shoegaze.” To make the collection, Lew collaborated with Jackson Phillips (aka Day Wave) who co-wrote some of the songs and can be heard singing on the sweeping duet “Breakdown,” a downbeat call-and-response chronicling the petty desire to see someone who’s wronged you fail. When she’s not making music, Lew is an accomplished designer and tends to describe her music visually. “I’m not a synesthete, but I think about color a lot. Close Up was all light blues and yellows, an airy pastel palette. Stop at Nothing is dark red and night blue, it has its moments of brightness and levity, but it’s another side of me.”
The other side is consumed by obsessions and fixations, spiraling thoughts that recur in Lew’s mind any given time of the day and won’t let up until they’re put into song. Singles “Cellar” and “Vaporized” anchor the EP, described by Lew as a couple who live together in the same house. Together, they manifest her conflicting infatuation with horror movies and intense fear of death. Inspired by films like Psycho and Barbarian, “Cellar” toys with the quintessential horror trope of a character entering a room wherein something terrible is bound to happen, a fact that only the audience knows. Over a plush bed of layered guitars, Lew sings of her own craving to enter those obviously haunted spaces, despite it feeling, on some level, “Oh so wrong.” The choral refrain, “The cellar’s where I belong,” captures that sense of disquiet and the inability to look away from what most would rather ignore.
“I hate the part of myself that has this morbid curiosity,” Lew says. “Like when a celebrity dies, I need to know all of the details, I want to know what happens.” We all possess a latent fear of death, but for Lew that fear is acute, and only through music is she able to talk about it. “Why is it that I can laugh at a horror movie but I can’t even talk to a therapist about my intense fear of dying?” That duality is illuminated by “Vaporized,” the EP’s sprightly closing track that glimmers despite its grim content. Over a buoyant lead guitar part reminiscent of the Cure, Lew describes the sensation of drowning, which serves as both a metaphor for mortal dread as well as a not-so-metaphorical illustration of what it might feel like to, well, drown. “I know I say that I’m fine, but it sticks with you/ Try hard to remember I’m happy/ Yeah I’m trying to,” Lew sings on the refrain before the chorus hits, itself an admission the narrator has lost control. “Out of my mind, out of my mind,” it goes.
There’s a cinematic quality to Stop at Nothing influenced by authors like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose complicated, if unlikable, female characters go to extreme lengths to satisfy a dull ache at the center of their existence. Her nourish approach to fiction can be heard on “Dramatic,” a parodic song Lew wrote about parasocial relationships developing between regular people and celebrity influencers. Plan a vacation to another country/ Saw you were there maybe a month ago,” Lew sings to a social media scion. “Land into town I doubt it ever hits me/ Get in the pool, it’s like that episode.” Instrumentally, it’s the heaviest track on the EP, and its clarity of vision positions Sea Lemon alongside contemporary storytellers like Japanese Breakfast, whose ever-rising profile as a fellow Asian-American indie pop artist has boosted Lew’s confidence in her ability to tell stories that feel at once singular and relatable to a wider audience. When she isn’t writing music, or designing, Lew writes short fiction and while her debut collection still awaits on the horizon, for now, Stop at Nothing offers us a glimpse of her extraordinary mind.
