hemlocke springs talks touring with Chappell Roan, religious guilt, and her fantastical debut album 'the apple tree under the sea' • Interview • DIY Magazine

For anyone who’s taken even a cursory glance over the online presence of hemlocke springs - awash as it is with playful videos, outlandish outfits, and mermaid shades of pink, purple, and blue - it should come as no surprise that the multi-hyphenate chooses to conduct her press commitments from her very own castle. That is, she logs on to today’s video call surrounded by a pale froth of tulle, the fairytale canopy of her bed forming a haphazardly draped, delightfully playful backdrop to the next forty minutes. Even over Zoom, her ebullience is contagious, the epitome of what internet parlance would term ‘healing your inner child’. But don’t be fooled; joyfully whimsical she may be, hemlocke springs - the musiker moniker of Isimeme ‘Naomi’ Udu - is also a force to be reckoned with.

Having originally embarked on a very different path (namely, postgrad medical studies at Dartmouth), Naomi’s horizons widened fairly suddenly in 2022, when a pair of bedroom-produced singles - ‘gimme all ur luv’ and ‘girlfriend’ - marked her out as an alt-pop maverick with a taste for the maximalist. 2023 EP ‘going…going…GONE!’ stationed her in good company, too, its impeccably-executed, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach on par with the high-drama earworms of fellow worldbuilders Chappell Roan and Conan Gray (particularly his ‘80s pastiche 2024 outing, ‘Found Heaven’). So much so, in fact, that Naomi found herself opening for both stars last year - something she grinningly describes as “supporting Ariel and Eric”.

“I think doing that made me really realise how out of shape I am,” she laughs, reflecting on the experience. “I was training, but now I’m seriously TRAINING. I’m not like these young ‘uns; I’m not old, but I’m older [born in ‘98! - Ed], so I’m feeling it. I felt like a student, almost,” she continues, “and I was very honoured to be able to study both of their crafts. Both respective fan bases are really into dressing up, really into the culture, so I’m definitely taking notes in my head!”

If Chappell and Conan are cast as The Little Mermaid’s red-headed heroine and dashing prince, then who does that make Naomi? Not Ursula - she’s far too good-natured for that - but perhaps another sort of sea-witch; a character in the same subaquatic universe who, while that fable unfolds, is busy with a quest of her own.

“I feel like I did need some sort of escape in my head [as a child], and so I daydreamed a LOT.”

Framing a personal journey of self-discovery as akin to eating from the (maritime) Tree of Knowledge, ‘the apple tree under the sea’ - Naomi’s debut full-length as hemlocke - is a kaleidoscopic semi-concept album in which allegory is used to excavate her Christian upbringing in North Carolina to Nigerian immigrant parents. Despite not necessarily being a big fan of fantasy growing up, Naomi explains that framing the record as such allows a certain narrative distance, enabling her to traverse personal topics without straying too close to confessional overkill or coming-of-age cliché.

“If I think about myself in my stories, I get… argh!” she trails off, laughing at her own expression of disgust. “So if I [use characters], I can really just lay into a different world.” Of her childhood, she admits that “I feel like I did need some sort of escape in my head, and so I daydreamed a LOT. If I watched Snow White or something, I took elements of that - and then when I needed to just not be present, I guess, I’d go ‘oh yeah, I’m with the dwarves’.” She laughs: “I’d genuinely talk to myself… in a concerning way.”

In the world of ‘the apple tree under the sea’, it is a version of hemlocke who’s cast as the tale’s protagonist (see the Rock, Paper, Scissors warrior she becomes in ‘the beginning of the end’’s Rocky-esque video) but it’s also one which, until recently, was never quite fully realised; there’s particular power, we suggest, in her being a young Black woman, given how, historically, fantasy heroics were the preserve of plucky (white) men. “Oh yeah, definitely,” she nods. “I think part of me maybe felt, navigating the world as a young Black girl, that I had to be more practical than everybody else I encountered. I think perhaps that’s why a lot of my work derives [from] this fantasy essence - because maybe I felt that I needed to be more practical, and that I wasn’t really allowed to dream.”

She pauses, hedging slightly (“Maybe that’s how I felt… who knows?”) before catching herself and asserting, with a self-conscious chuckle: “Not who knows - I do know that’s what I’m saying. It’s almost that if I wanted permission to dream, I couldn’t, so I had to just do it in a little corner in my mind. So it’s nice to be able to freely do whatever I want now.”

“I think part of me felt, navigating the world as a young Black girl, that I had to be more practical than everybody else I encountered.”

At the core of the album is ‘sense (is)’ - an arch synth-pop epiphany that marks the point hemlocke pops the cultural bubble of her youth (as represented by opener ‘the red apple’) and embraces the wider world’s full experiential spectrum. Recalling this “pretty recent discovery”, Naomi notes: “I think I was only able to see it through music. Once I created hemlocke - that was what, when I was 23 or 24? - I finally started listening and thinking ‘what am I saying in my songs?’. ‘Girl, I think you went through something!’,” she laughs.

“I think I had probably felt it [before], but didn’t realise until I grew up and was able to see in hindsight just how much I was affected by my childhood. It wasn’t necessarily a bad experience, as much as it was just a different experience. There are parts of myself that I kind of subdued; I was surrounded by a lot of church folk, and I would say that my family - but also just in general - are very patriarchal…,” she drops the thread, still smiling. “I don’t know where I was going with that, so I’m gonna stop there.

“There were views I didn’t really align with, but I wasn’t gonna say anything, because I [was] living in my parents’ house. So you just kind of subdue everything, and I guess I unknowingly hid how I felt a lot. I just thought ‘okay, I have to be traditional’. ‘Get good grades, do what you need to do so you can become a doctor, and find yourself a husband and have kids, and support your children and husband, and have this nuclear family’.”

The turning point, then - like most teenagers - was when Naomi moved out, trading her hometown for the blank canvas and cultural melting pot of college. “You don’t have anyone really telling you what you need to do. I thought: ‘I can do things!’,” she giggles mischievously. “But I also said: ‘oh, I’m having a little bit of trouble thinking for myself’, because I realised I’d relied a lot on [external opinions]. I never really stopped and asked ‘Naomi, what do you want?’.”

“I tried to remain as a‑influential as possible.”

If ‘the apple tree under the sea’ is anything to go by, what she wanted, as it turns out, was an expansive, truly technicolour existence, unconstrained by societal norms or narrow-mindedness. Both as a musician and as a person, you sense, she has an open-door policy whereby nothing is too outlandish, and experimentation is everything. Across the record’s ten tracks, there’s winking layers of contrast at play: ‘heads, shoulders, knees and ankles’ sets medieval language (“Very well, I wager he’s a ruffian with a countenance so drawn!”) atop a bouncing bed of 140 drums; while ‘moses’ revels in both Biblical imagery and gospel-like layered vocals, and the kind of dance beat that would otherwise have Becky Hill written all over it.

Working with pop producer to the stars BURNS (who’s credited on hits by Lady Gaga, Britney, Charli xcx and more), Naomi swapped at-home Logic sessions for his studio, delighting in - and a tad daunted by - the toys at her disposal. “‘Kid in a candy shop’ is the perfect description, because it was [a case of saying]: ‘there’s so many things we can do!’. But then going: ‘oh, there’s SO many things we can do.’ You get a tummy ache after a while!,” she laughs.

Across the LP, you can hear the bratty pop-punk of Avril Lavigne (‘the beginning of the end’), the electroclash of early Scissor Sisters (‘be the girl!’), and even the sultry R&B of peak ‘00s girl groups (‘set me free’) - but imitation, this certainly ain’t. “BURNS and I work a little bit differently in that he would say ‘oh, this reminds me of this song’ and would go and search it up, but I try to stay away from that,” she affirms. “I tried to remain as… a-influential? - we’re making words up here! - as possible, and instead just say: “let’s keep the blinders on a little bit and see where everything takes us’. People might say ‘this sounds a bit ‘80s’, and I’ve heard Prince’s name thrown around a lot, but I think I can kind of reach somewhere in the stratosphere and pull [down] an element that sounds a little bit new. That was my goal.” She grins. “We’ll see if I’ve achieved it…”

“I sometimes feel like both the gold star and the black sheep.”

Having taken more than a bite from the forbidden fruit, Naomi’s finally been able to plant its seeds, reconciling both sides of her identity such that she doesn’t have to suppress one nor fully reject the other. “I’m definitely still spiritual, but I’m not necessarily CHRISTIAN!,” she gives an unexpected sort of roar, before giggling infectiously. “I think I’ve left that phase of my life, for very good reason.

“A lot of the ideology is something that, maybe at a certain point in time, I didn’t really question, but I think particularly for Black people, knowing how we got involved in Christianity [i.e.: colonial missions] and taking that into account… in essence, I’m pretty iffy. But,” she concludes brightly, “each to their own.” And, after all, what is railing against your parents - be it over politics, religion, or dying your hair blue - if not a fundamental part of growing up? Naomi nods: “There can be equal frustration, but there can also be mutual respect. I’m not them, and they’re not me, so of course we’re going to have different opinions; that’s just inevitable.”

She smiles, a familiar glint in her eye. “How I describe myself, particularly with my family, is that I sometimes feel like both the gold star and the black sheep.” hemlocke springs, we’d argue, is even more besides; a popstar of true multitudes, you’d need a far broader palette to paint a portrait of this artist.

‘the apple tree under the sea’ is out now via AWAL.

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