hemlocke springs releases new single and and visualizer for “heavun” today, the latest revelation from the 24-year-old North Carolina breakout act. The new track follows “‘sever the blight,” “stranger danger!,” and the explosive debut single“girlfriend,” which quickly affirmed her place as one of alt-pop’s most progressive and prodigious new talents, racking up over 30 million streams. As well as drawing immediate critical praise from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Pigeons & Planes, The FADER, LA Times and more, she’s already stacked up co-signs from the likes ofGrimes, Toro y Moi and Steve Lacy (who recently called her the most exciting artist of 2023).
It would be easy mistake “heavun” as a love song – where the protagonist yearns for the halcyon promise of romance through refrains like “heaven only knows how I’ve longed for you.” But in the world of hemlocke springs, nothing is ever quite as it seems. In a direct pivot from “stranger danger!,” her self-professed “anti-capitalist anthem”), hemlocke reveals that the true object of her protagonist’s desire on “heavun” is actually boundless wealth. By becoming her avaricious anti-hero, she hopes to unpack the mindset behind this deadly sin, explaining; “For a time, I thought if a person was money-motivated, they were greedy. But by that definition, everyone is greedy, so that’s a bit unfair. I don’t consider wanting to pay bills or go on occasional excursions as greedy actions. But what if I had an insatiable hunger for money? I wanted to.
On August 3 hemlocke springs will make her festival debut with a slot at Lollapalooza in Chicago. She has also announced her debut London headline show at Colors Hoxton on November 9, and will play alongside CHAI at Pitchfork Music Festival Berlin earlier that month. All tour dates are listed below.
hemlocke springs 2023 live dates:
Aug 3 – Lollapalooza – Chicago, IL
11/1 – Pitchfork Music Festival – Berlin, DE (ZENNER with CHAI)
11/9 – Hoxton Colors – London, UK
hemlocke springs is Isimeme ‘Naomi’ Udu – the first-generation American daughter of Nigerian parents, raised on the outskirts of Charlotte, NC. Naomi recalls her childhood there as relatively standard—lots of time at Carolina Mall, lots of friends, lots of church. Neither of her parents played music, but they loved it, their home filled with contemporary American gospel and Nigerian folk, even some mainstream rap. Naomi’s preteen epiphany, though, was the video for Avicii’s ‘Levels,’ “This is the music—this is art,” she remembers thinking, marveling at an exasperated office worker pushing a stone up a hill like Sisyphus.“This is it.”
Having just completed a master’s degree in medical informatics at Dartmouth just four months ago, Naomi is now staring at the possibility of an entirely surprising and major music career, based on a flawless series of intoxicating and idiosyncratic pop songs that have not only earned millions of streams but also the admiration of some of music’s biggest names. Naomi is instantly likable, someone who opens up about her life with such candor and wit that you cannot resist doing the same. A K-Pop authority with a supreme ’80s playlist she updates with the enthusiasm of a rare record collector (full of Depeche Mode, Phil Collins and Kate Bush), Naomi makes music that mirrors her very nature—great and welcoming at first glance, yes, but interesting and unordinary enough to keep you captivated for the long run. Her songs — accessible and intricate, poppy and provocative—are much more than 15-second flybys. As she approaches her much-demanded debut project, it’s hard to shake the fantastic feeling that she is, too.
Naomi first came to notice with a triptych of hits on TikTok, but she only signed up for the service to look around, not because she wanted to share her own stuff or because she craved some social media ducats. (When she decided to post work of her own, she used a name generator to come up with her handle, for fear her parents would find her account.) From time to time, she’d post songs under assorted names and delete them when she was over it. That was, she presumed, the eventual fate for hemlocke springs and “gimme all ur love,” a tune brainstormed during the course of two showers and recorded so as to forestall a pending machine learning assignment. She casually posted it to SoundCloud in May 2022 amid midterm stress at Dartmouth, expecting nothing. Even when its popularity ballooned online within a week, she thought, at best, she would list it as an extracurricular achievement on her imminent doctorate application. “I was going to put it on my résumé: ‘I did this song and it got some attention,’” she remembers. “This will pass by, and that’s totally cool, just how life goes.”
But then it happened again, in November 2022, amid the hubbub of finals and Naomi’s 24th birthday. ‘girlfriend’ —two minutes of flippant romantic mirth, as direct as a cheerleading chant but as slippery as a B-52s curio—became such a hit that Naomi had to stop responding to laudatory messages about it so she could study for her last tests. “After those first two singles, I knew that I was going to be put into a ‘quirky’ box fairly quickly,” she says. “So I decided to make the antithesis.” When she released single three, ‘stranger danger!,’ in January 2023, the consensus regarding the newly minted master in medical informatics was unanimous: How was everything she touched so consummately catchy? Still, where her first two smashes had been playful ditties, this burst of effervescence slashed at both capitalism and the patriarchy, cutting at the core of our endlessly extractive systems.
To be honest, she’s not too worried about ascribing meaning to the comings and goings of a career that has come as a complete surprise. When Naomi starts to write a song, that same feeling of satisfaction that she first found as a teenager playing around with pals in GarageBand returns. Making music simply scratches a mental itch that sits somewhere between the organization of science and her enduring sense of play. These days, she gets up early to do it, rising before dawn to work on songs before the communiques of the industry inevitably begin to arrive. The act of building these pieces into a proper debut thrills her, a process of research, creation, and refinement—good work for a scientist who doubles as a pop savant.
