hemlocke springs is boredom’s remedy

BORN ISIMEME UDU AND KNOWN by her friends as Naomi, hemlocke springs has been on an ascent since 2021, when she started putting demos on SoundCloud. But her music-making journey goes back to around 2013, when she befriended a freshman named MJ during her sophomore year of high school in Concord, North Carolina. “Everybody was in their cliques, and it was just literally us two,” Udu remembers. “We were like, ‘Well, hey.’ They made music on GarageBand and they showed me it.” She started messing around with the software too, on an iPad that’s no longer with us. Music was never a priority. She studied biology at Spelman and got her master’s degree in medical informatics from Dartmouth.

Dartmouth is where her love-hate relationship with SoundCloud began, when she got into a groove of posting dozens of demo tracks and then unposting them out of embarrassment. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I was trying to be a singer.’ Nah, fam. I don’t know what I was doing,” she says. Under the banner of the random-name-generated handle hemlocke springs, Udu put “Jacob” online and then shared “gimme all ur luv” after that. Unlike “the beginning of the end,” she still finds the doo-wop-meets-electropop latter to be endearing. “I was sick and I hated my Machine Learning teacher,” she recalls. “But, you know, he got me here—so thank you, in an indirect way. But I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this homework, I’m gonna make a song.’ I’d just discovered TikTok. Why not? And then it did what it did. I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of cute.’”

“gimme all ur luv” is still Udu’s favorite song, because it came out “before everything got more complicated.” Don’t get it twisted: Udu loves her team, and she loves being able to make music for a living. But circumstances were different back then. “I was just rippin’ around and I didn’t have to depend on music for monetary stuff.” Grimes co-signed “gimme all ur luv” and the single’s lived on the internet ever since. Udu released the idiosyncratic pop banger “girlfriend” in late 2022 and got even more popular (NME named her an “essential emerging artist” for 2023 in the wake of the song’s virality). hemlocke springs wasn’t some hobby project spilling out of a Dartmouth girl’s bedroom anymore, and the success Udu found was confusing and stuffy. “I don’t think I dealt with it well. I think I was really excited at first, but then everything started taking a toll,” she admits. “That’s when I decided, ‘Okay, well, I’ll go the artist route.’ But I went in with no preparation, so I felt dissonance in myself.” She kept on releasing songs after “girlfriend,” but only after taking a step back. “I don’t think I was ready, but moments happen for a reason.”

She posted for a year and a half while keeping her celebrity at arm’s length, in an effort to manage the overstimulating engagement. “Compared to other songs that have gone viral—like, really viral, with hundreds of millions of streams—I wonder how those artists dealt with such success, because I’m struggling with this amount. Like, how are you doing? How are you okay? But I love that people gravitated towards the song.” She pauses for a moment. “I’m grateful for it, because it led me towards becoming hemlocke springs.”

UDU EVENTUALLY LEFT THE SOUTHEAST for Los Angeles, where she currently resides, but she hates it here (she says she “took the wrong turn down Hollywood and now I’ll turn forever” in her song “sense(is)”). “I did need to switch it up there, I can tell you honestly,” she clarifies. “I think I’m still finding my footing. I want to say that, as the years go by, maybe I’ll find my group, but I feel like that’s describing Stockholm Syndrome. This is just not my place.” I ask her if geography plays a factor in her work, having made her Going…Going…Gone! EP in North Carolina and her debut album, the apple tree under the sea, in California. Specifically, I ask if LA, for better or for worse, has influenced this chapter.

“Low-key… for worse,” she replies and I don’t doubt her, “but I feel like it’s because of the music environment here. Everything’s just so fast-paced. Even writing songs, sometimes I find myself thinking, ‘Oh, is it catchy? Is it commercial? Will it make me money?’ in a way I didn’t think about when I was anywhere else. I wasn’t really surrounded by anybody in the music industry. But now? Yikes. It’s a matter of acclimating to how it is. I’ve made sure to set my boundaries. I put my phone on do-not-disturb. I take some walks. Then things get a little bit calmer.”

“I’ve been getting ads on Instagram for that BRICK phone blocker, while I’m on my phone,” I say.

“We’re in a simulation. I need those ads, low-key.”

North Carolina, California, whatever—Udu is able to link up with BURNS anywhere and make good shit with him. The producer has a history with Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, and Ariana Grande, confirming him as one of pop music’s most formidable builders. With a project as narratively expansive as hemlocke springs’, he’s Udu’s perfect foil, matching her curiosity with rich, exciting doses of strings, choral sections, big guitars, and even bigger rhythmic fills. I ask Udu if she has to step up her game when she’s with somebody like him, a producer who’s so instrumentally ambitious. The question hits a nerve, but only initially. “Step up my game? I brought the demo, Matt!”

“C’mon, you know y’all feed off each other,” I insist.

“I’m dead. We do.”

Udu says BURNS’ approach means building a world within a song. She starts her demos on Logic, putting them in one- or two-dimensional spaces, and then “he’s able to really put the 3-D in there,” she elaborates. “That’s something I envy about him.” Udu isn’t the type to sit on a couch and let a producer fiddle with her art across the room. Instead, she’s up at the boards with BURNS, fingers all over the buttons and eyes glued to every monitor. Her musical vocabulary allows her to have full control over the basics. “I can get a demo up to a certain point, but BURNS can really bring the life out of shit,” she says. “I wish I could do that. It’s a skill, because he’s been in the industry for a long time.”

The hemlocke springs catalogue is full of generation-spanning pop-culture reminders: Janet Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Enya, Santogold, to name a few. It’s catchy knowledge Udu gained from studying the artists who came before her, but that’s where the tribute stops. “When creating a song, I try not to go that route of ‘Okay, this needs a Phil Collins drum,’ you know?” she explains. “It takes the surprise out of where the song could go.” Maybe that song does need a Phil Collins drum, but it’s important to Udu that she isn’t just listening to music she loves. “I’m making sure I’m not stringently just in one area. When I’m working on a song, I don’t really know what I want. That’s what producing is—figuring out what I want. The song will tell you what it needs.”

It’s not always Cyndi Lauper fills and Ray of Light tempos. That first hemlocke springs tape, Going…Going…Gone!, had a fascinating bounce. In 2023 I wrote, “hemlocke springs might be the first internet rock star who sticks around long enough to turn virality into sold-out tours, charting hits, and industry-wide acclaim,” and she’s nearly there. Gigs with Chappell Roan, Doja Cat, and Conan Gray and big-name festival slots across the globe have primed her intoxicating, celestial adventures and “awkward Black girl anthems” for realtime clout.

There are a lot of shiny ‘80s R&B and squelchy synth-pop ideas fluttering through Udu’s work. Steve Lacy labeled “girlfriend” a classic, and Doechii even called it a song that “surpasses this time.” But Udu’s sentimental urges are subconscious. If something is retro, historical, and palatable in her springy vocals and kitchen-sink production, it’s because she’s 27 years old and “hip to the times.” “It’s a really deep, rich pocket up in here,” she beams. “I think that I don’t think, and that’s what makes it the best type of music for me. Sometimes I’ll just let the song take over. And then people can say great things about it and how they interpret it. And then I can be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m smart. Look at me!’”

Udu is bubbly and nonchalant during our call. She makes up words and her laugh spans the entire screen. But in her music she boasts a serious, encyclopedic command of pop music on top of that Disney kid-like excitement. That comes from years of tinkering, figuring out what she likes. “It’s a strenuous, hard process,” she reveals. “But it’s also a fun process. My likes change, so it’s finding a way to acclimate to that. ‘I like this in this song today, but today that just sounds like shit.’” She grabs a nearby makeup brush and says it could make a sound that ends up in a song. “Try it and see. If you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. Now you have a thing to cross out from an infinite number of possibilities. That infinite number can be very daunting, but it’s also like, wow, the world is literally my oyster.” Udu rummages around her desk before picking up a cup of Chipotle queso. “Let’s see if that makes a sound that I can put in a song. Why not? Who’s gonna stop me?”

THE DEBUT HEMLOCKE SPRINGS ALBUM, the apple tree under the sea, began unknowingly in 2023, when Udu released “sever the blight,” a Kate Bush-recalling, damsel-in-distress single set in a magical, storm-ridden forest. The track didn’t show up on Going…Going…Gone!, much to the chagrin of her fans (which she affectionately calls “lockets”), but it didn’t need to: “girlfriend” is still the most popular hemlocke springs song, sitting at 56 million total streams, but “sever the blight” is beloved. “That’s the song that a lot of artists who I look up to are like, ‘I love that song,’” Udu confirms, grinning wide. “The amount of positivity that stemmed from that song, it was definitely a moment of ‘Oh, this tapped into something that’s confumling and I want to explore that feeling, less so the genre.’”

She was going to take that song’s medieval ideas and record an entire album of them, but it didn’t end up happening. Udu thought making several iterations of “sever the blight” would become redundant, and she was daunted by the possibility of it happening. But that song’s feeling gave her ample material to pull from. “Focusing on that, we got a record. That was partly the reason why it didn’t end up on the EP. I felt like it was tapping towards another dimension, and I just love this dimension that I’m in here.”

Medieval influences get woven into the apple tree under the sea’s tracklist, but the album runs more like a digital age fairytale untangling Udu’s Christian upbringing and Nigerian family tree. hemlocke springs gravitates toward fantasy because Udu considers herself to be a boring person who needs “a world where things are not boring.” the apple tree under the sea opens with “the red apple” and an image of Udu wandering through a barren desert. The song’s purpose correlates with her relationship to religion changing during adulthood. “I want to say that I have a good amount of trauma with religion but, if anything, I think it was an OK experience,” she tells me. “But sometimes I listen to the record and I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe you’re downplaying it.’ I repressed myself a lot during that time in a way that I don’t anymore. I listen back and I’m remembering how I was then in comparison to how I am today. I’m like, ‘Oh, I get why people describe you as this quirky, whimsical person.’”

Whimsy be damned, the apple tree under the sea is hemlocke springs’ origin story—a question of “Why am I the way that I am?” embodied in very good songs like the sophisticated, trip-hop-pilled “w-w-w-w-w,” which she built out of siren, African Seed Caxixi, and lo-fi country drum pre-sets on Logic. Looking for an answer, Udu contacted her past selves. She went back to high school, when she “wore all black, just trying to fit in as much as possible because I didn’t want perceivement,” she says. “Maybe I just wanted to go with the flow. Who knows what I wanted.” The songs she came back with are searching—for something, anything to tell Udu about her life and where it’s supposed to go—and folkloric. “What am I supposed to be feeling when I don’t feel anything?” she asks aloud, before catching herself. “The tortured soul.” Now that she’s not a grad student procrastinating her way into viral hits, hemlocke springs is a pop phenom-in-waiting. She’s taking crumbs of Prince, CHVRCHES, Timbaland, Depeche Mode, and Kate Bush and cooking full meals with them. What I’m getting at here is: the apple tree under the sea could have been a simple, by-the-numbers debut, but with Udu in the driver’s seat, we get sugar plums colored outside the lines by breakbeats, punk streaks, and timeless, playful pop tricks instead.

hemlocke springs may be Udu’s character—a persona that allows her to explore more exciting fictions in her music—but the apple tree under the sea is her own hero’s journey. Udu possesses a literary talent that lets her musicality time travel. Grief, trauma, and heartache are jolted by bildungsroman sparks and Simlish-style baroque pop. In “w-w-w-w-w,” she’s marrying a racist old man to get her family out of poverty. By “moses,” she’s commanding the tectonic chaos around her like a sea-parting prophet. Life unspools into discomfort, but hemlocke springs turns it into self-mythology. “When it’s happening to me, it’s like, ‘Oh, this sucks.’ But when it’s happening to hemlocke, it’s lore. It’s a background story,” Udu comments. “I can make it into literally a fantasy, even if it’s a non-fiction fantasy. I love that I’m able to make it that way. It almost allows me to be an audience member as well and peer in. I feel like it can keep me divorced in a good way from what’s going on.” Confidence abounds when imagination disarms the system.

But Udu has fun giving parts of herself away in the apple tree under the sea, because “it just happens, and I just let it happen. We’re all on the same journey now, huh? You’re stuck with me.” Udu’s an optimist all the way down, even when she’s spiraling on the mic. “It’s just fun to see where a song takes you—see how much I relate to it, how much I don’t relate to it. And then I let it go in the stratosphere.” Udu makes words like “tenebrous” and “vexation” and “choler” sound splashy and approachable while chasing after vibrance and bringing turmoil along for the ride. Pop escapism and unpacked consequences sound honest and transformative under her care, in awesome textural monuments like “head, shoulders, knees and ankles,” “be the girl!”, and “sense(is).” the apple tree under the sea is bratty, sticky, fun as hell, and shockingly uncomplicated in its ambitions. You can’t box in an artist like her.

I don’t know what a Gen-Z popstar is supposed to look or sound like yet, but I’d like to think hemlocke springs is on her way to becoming one. the apple tree under the sea isn’t so much a coming-of-age record as it is a settling-into-yourself record. Accepting, resisting, imagining. It’s all there, in cartoonish hits spilling out of a queer Black woman’s laptop. But Udu’s story is far from finished, because she doesn’t like finishing anything. “I’m so good at starting stuff—starting ideas, even taking them to the middle,” she confirms. “But finishing them sucks. Maybe that’s a personal thing. That probably is a personal thing, reflective of myself in some way that I cannot tell you right now—not because I’m not willing to share. Maybe in the next record I’ll find out why.” Maybe by the next record she’ll like “the beginning of the end” again, too.

the apple tree under the sea is out February 13 via AWAL.

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.