hemlocke springs - 'Heavun'
Hemlocke Springs releases earworm single ‘heavun’ after viral single ‘girlfriend’ and the most recent single ‘sever the bright’.
Hemlocke Springs is Isimeme ‘Naomi’ Udo, which is the first-generation American daughter of Nigerian parents, Naomi was raised on the outskirts of Charlotte city in Concord, North Carolina. Recalling her childhood as relatively standard with lots of time spent at Carolina Mall, lots of friends and lots of church. Neither of her parents played music, but they loved it and filled their home with contemporary American gospel, Nigerian folk and even some mainstream rap. Naomi’s preteen epiphany was for Avicii’s music video for ‘Levels’ and she remembers thinking, “This is the music – this is art.” as she marvelled at the exasperated office worker in the video pushing a stone up a hill like Sisyphus.
With Hemlocke Springs just completing a master’s degree in medical informatics at the Ivy League ranked Dartmouth College, Naomi is now staring at the possibility of a major music career, based on a flawless series of intoxicating pop songs that have not only earned millions of streams but also the admiration of some of the music’s biggest names. Hemlocke Springs is instantly likeable, she is someone who opens up about her life with such candor and wit that you cannot resist doing the same. Naomi makes music that mirrors her very nature, great and welcoming at first glance but interesting and unordinary enough to keep you captivated for the long run. Hemlocke Springs songs are accessible, intricate and provocative are much more than 15-second flybys and as she approaches her demanded debut project; it is hard to shake the fantastic feeling that she is too.
Naomi first came to notice with a triptych of hits on TikTok, but she did not join the app because she wanted to share her own creations. From time to time, she would post songs under assorted names and delete them when she was over it and she presumed that was the fate for Hemlocke Springs and ‘gimme all ur love’ a track brainstormed during two showers and recorded to forestall a pending machine learning assignment. Naomis casually posted it to SoundCloud in May 2022 amid midterm stress at Dartmouth expecting nothing. Even when the song’s popularity ballooned online within a week, she thought that at best she could list in 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. The two-minute track ‘girlfriend’ which has now reached over 27 million listeners. And after it became such a hit that Naomi had to stop responding to laudatory messages 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.” In January 2023 she then released the third single, ‘stranger danger!’ where compared to the first 2 singles this was a burst of effervescence slashed at both capitalism and the patriarchy, which cuts at the core of our endlessly extractive systems.
Naomi is not too worried about ascribing meaning to the comings and goings of a career that has come as a complete surprise. When she begins to write a song, that same feeling of satisfaction that she first found as a teenage playing around with pals in GarageBand returns. Making music 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 begin to arrive. The act of building these pieces into a proper debut, thrills her.
Hemlocke Springs releases the new single ‘heavun’, which premiered with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. She has received critical praise from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and Pigeons & Planes and more, and has already stacked co-signs from the likes of Grimes, Toro y Moi and Steve Lacy who called her the most exciting artist od 2023. Hemlocke has also announced her debut London headline show at Colors Hoxton for November 9th and will play alongside CHAI at Pitchfork Music Festival Berlin.
Back to the new single ‘heavun’ it would be easy to mistake it as a love song, where the protagnist years for the halcyon promise of romance through lyrics like ‘heaven only knows how I’ve longed for you.’ Hemlocke Springs that the true object of her protagonist’s desire on ‘heavun’ is boundless wealth, by becoming her avaricious anti-hero and Naomi hopes to unpack the mindset behind this deadly sin. As she explains, “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 explore the psychology of greediness.”
Words by Beth Simms
