FEATURE:
Spotlight
before I publish this feature. I am writing this on 27th December, so we might get another Hemlocke Springs track soon (I think one is due on 13th January). One big reason to love her is the fact she counts Kate Bush as a heroine. Compared to the legend, Springs has named The Dreaming (Bush’s 1982 album) as important to her. More on that later. In the space of a short time and with a couple of tracks under her belt, there is already this huge buzz and excitement around Hemlocke Springs. A lot of the attention centres around the viral smash, girlfriend. A song that has connected with a huge audience, it is an exceptional offering from an artist that instantly seduced me, I want to source a few of the interviews that Hemlocke Springs gave last year. Rolling Stone looked at the background and swift rise to prominence of an artist you will hear a lot more from this year:
“BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL singer was not Hemlocke Springs’ plan. Born Isimeme Udu in Concord, North Carolina, the budding star had more academic plans for her future: After getting a biology degree from Spelman and thinking about a career in the medical field, her interest in bioinformatics led her to the Master of Science degree from Dartmouth.
“In my first couple months here, I was starting to think med school is not for me,” she says with a laugh. She’s speaking to Rolling Stone from her current apartment near Dartmouth’s campus before she moves back home to North Carolina. “My thing was like ‘I’m gonna do medical research, maybe get some papers in, and then I can do my PhD somewhere.”
But music lingered in the background of Udu’s life. She did choir in middle school and was introduced to GarageBand by a friend in high school. She toyed around with the program, eventually investing in Logic while in college.
“It was kind of a stress mechanism,” she explains. “Whenever I just wanted to get things out, I was just like ‘I’ll just go on Logic.’ But it was never anything concrete. Just a hobby.”
Around the time she started making songs on GarageBand and Logic, Udu became obsessed with Eighties music. She had grown up loving EDM like Cascada and Calvin Harris as well as K-pop groups like BTS and EXO, but a Spotify recommendation of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” sent her into a nostalgia-fueled synth-pop rabbit hole that reshaped her taste and musical inspiration.
As she was beginning her program at Dartmouth, Udu began to wonder if she should let people hear the songs that were becoming more fully formed realities. She would put a song up on SoundCloud only to immediately delete it soon after. Then, one day, she got tired of giving up so quickly.
“I’ve always been reticent about revealing that I sing and do Logic on the side,” she explains. Around the start of this year, she made a resolution to own it and start even telling her friends. “I just wanted to get rid of that feeling of embarrassment.”
In the spring, Udu, under the name Hemlocke Springs, released a demo called “Jacob” that was then followed by “Gimme All Ur Luv,” an indie romance of a song with one of the year’s dreamiest choruses. It was written during a time she was really depressed, taking three of her hardest classes. She was avoiding an assignment for one of those classes and recovering from a bout of Covid when she stayed up late one night to write out the track. It ended up changing her life.
“I was just kind of getting into TikTok,” she says. She saw how independent artist promoted their own songs on there and thought that she might as well try it herself. “I posted it. And I went to sleep. And I woke up and it got more views than I thought it was going to get”.
@hemlockesprings even better fun fact: girlfriend was on my “bad songs” list (yes, I have a list of songs I’ve written that i consider to be bad) …I went thru a time i absolutely ABHORRED the song, and it was never going to see the light of day. People who hate the song will NEVER hate it the way I did lol 😂 #hemlockesprings #newindiemusic2022 #newmusic #fyp #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp ♬ girlfriend - Hemlocke Springs
This year is going to be the one where Hemlocke Springs explodes and puts more of her amazing music out there. She has gained press interest in the U.K. too. Many are sniffy when we say someone is a ‘TikTok artist’, but it is a valuable platform that means artists like Hemlocke Springs can find a willing and supportive audience. NME spoke with the U.S. artist when she was visiting North Carolina. I have selected a few parts of the interview. It is interesting what she says about Kate Bush and The Dreaming:
“But following the viral smash of ‘Girlfriend’ – which has already racked up over 10 million plays on Spotify since its early November release – the self-described musical “hobbyist” has put any immediate plans for a medical career on ice. And it’s easy to see why, even if the recorded output has been limited: on both ‘Girlfriend’ and ‘Gimme All Ur Luv’, Hemlocke Springs displays a rare gift for making percussive pop music with an intimate and deeply emotional core, not unlike Prince during his ‘Purple Rain’ peak.
Between trips to New York, Los Angeles and Asheville, NME caught up with Hemlocke Springs during a rare visit home to Concord, North Carolina, a suburb a few miles outside the city of Charlotte. All her music to date has been recorded in this home on the outskirts of the city, where she resides with her brother and her parents. Inside, she gives us a brief tour, including the bedroom where she recorded ‘Girlfriend’ to her phone in a matter of hours. “I recorded the vocals under a blanket so I wouldn’t wake my brother,” she says.
There are no instruments to be found in her bedroom, and she readily admits she has no formal musical training of any kind. “I wanted to learn the piano, but I took sewing lessons instead,” she quips at one point. The only real hint that we’re in the home of a musical artist comes once we’re seated in Hemlocke Springs’ living room and she opens her computer. We’re greeted by a sprawling document with various working song titles, and her wallpaper: a picture of BTS. “I went through a big K-Pop phase in college,” she says by way of introduction.
So now that you are doing music full-time, have you started to give any thought to what your live show will look like?
“I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll admit that the few times I’ve been on stage I don’t remember much. I know I was probably anxious, but the way I look at it, you either keep feeling that way or you put on a show. I don’t think I’ve shared this with anyone, but I definitely want to incorporate dance, even though I don’t consider myself a dancer. I was watching a video where Kate Bush was performing ‘Babooshka’ and she was doing all these amazing choreographed dance moves. It didn’t even seem like the kind of song you could really dance to, but she was doing it anyway. That’s what I want to do, but so far, it’s just been me and my hairbrush.”
Is Kate Bush a hero of yours?
“Totally. ‘The Dreaming’ completely changed my perspective on what music could be. The way she expresses her emotions vocally is so cool. I also like that it was a polarizing album when it first came out, but now so many artists name it as one of their favorites. I hope I can do that – put out an album and people are like, ‘What in the world?’, but then years later they’re like, ‘She was onto something.’”
Do you think that’s the reaction you’ll get with your debut album?
“I hope so. I do think people are going to be surprised. If I just heard those two songs [‘Gimme All Ur Luv’ and ‘Girlfriend’] before listening to the rest of the album, I’d be like ‘Oh.’ I’ve always had this fear of being boxed in, so I have a tendency to go in the opposite direction. Maybe not a 180, but let’s call it a 165.
“It’s weird to me the only two songs I have out are both under three minutes because I don’t usually like short songs. Those two just sounded complete. The rest are over three minutes and there’s probably going to be one on the album that’s over 7 minutes. It reminds me a bit of the Eurythmics and Depeche Mode”.
I don’t think anyone can overstate the importance of girlfriend. A song that has taken on a life of its own, there is no doubt that Hemlocke Springs is a sensation. Someone who has considered a life outside of music, I think she will have to accept the fact that music is now where she belongs. The Times wrote about the runaway success of the incredible girlfriend:
“On an app brimming with established stars pushing new music and small musicians trying to make it big, Hemlocke Springs stood out almost immediately — no dance, trend or gimmicks required.
Isimeme Udu — who also goes by Naomi — is the 24-year-old medical student behind the viral TikTok hit “girlfriend.” The pop newcomer created her musical alias with the help of a random name generator, following in the footsteps of artists like Childish Gambino and Post Malone. (The addition of the “e” in “Hemlocke” was Lorde-inspired.)
The day before Halloween, Udu teased the bridge of her single “girlfriend” while dressed as Dionne from Clueless. She was about to leave for a party when she thought to herself, “You know what? You’re just going to do a quick running man dance and then call it a day.”
The following afternoon, the video hit a million views.
After sharing the catchy bridge, which has now been used in over 60,000 TikToks, the North Carolina native quickly amassed a loyal following and landed on the radar of musicians like Khalid before the track even hit Spotify, where it has garnered over nine million streams since its Nov. 2 release.
The undeniable earworm quickly became an “awkward Black girl anthem,” a title Udu says she saw on TikTok and immediately embraced: “I’ve gotten a lot of support, particularly from a lot of Black women saying, ‘This is tapping into my awkward high school phase,’ or saying, ‘Where were you during high school?’”
“To be in such a space and to be regarded in such a way, it’s just amazing,” Udu tells PEOPLE. “I’m so honored.”
@hemlockesprings #duet with @hemlockesprings this will probably be one of the last vids I make before teasing the new single saturday #hemlockesprings #musicvideo #fyp #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp ♬ girlfriend - Hemlocke Springs
Months before “girlfriend” was even written, Udu laid the foundation for her TikTok fame with her first single “gimme all ur luv.” The Grimes-esque tune grabbed the attention of celebrities like Bella Hadid, who used it in a mini vlog, and Grimes herself, who called it “good.” The dreamy track kickstarted Udu’s popularity — but it almost didn’t make it out of the vault.
“On my SoundCloud, I would go and I would post a song and I would immediately remove it literally one minute later,” the singer confesses. “That was just a thing that I did.”
Udu still isn’t sure why she formed this habit — her exact words are “I have no clue” — but, ultimately, she had a change of heart. About six months ago, she decided to leave some of her songs up under the impression that “nobody is going to listen or see it anyway,” and one of them was “gimme all ur luv.”
Hemlocke Springs.
Michelle Li
The singer says she’s “still confused” about why “girlfriend” blew up and, to echo the song, it wasn’t really in her plans. Though the budding pop star has been making music secretly for seven years now — a statistic that shocked her to hear out loud — she’s been working toward a career in medicine for much longer.
As her song captivated TikTok, all that stood between Udu and the ability to become Hemlocke Springs full-time was two weeks of school. Motivated by her newfound notoriety, the Dartmouth master’s student powered through her “hellish” final semester, and says she’s ready to exchange her microscope for a microphone — at least for now.
“Multitasking is just not my thing,” she says with a laugh.
The rising star says that her family, particularly her mom and brother, are supportive of her career change, but her father still doesn’t know about her “music side”: “It’s always just been like, ‘I’m gonna go and I’m going to be a doctor. That’s been the path and that’s still what he thinks.”
Now signed to Good Luck Have Fun Records, Udu says that she’s working on an album and “would love to perform live” in the near future — something she’s previously only done in high school productions and talent shows.
“I’ve been practicing in my room with a hairbrush,” the TikTok star admits. “I don’t know if I should have said that out loud, but I have”.
Undoubtably one of the most original and exhilarating artists around, the brilliance of Hemlocke Springs is clear. This wonderous and exceptionally innovative artist already has so many fans behind her. When a debut album does come, I think it will be among the best and most interesting in years. A new song, stranger danger, looks like it may drop on 13th January. Everybody needs to be aware of…
THIS amazing musician.
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