As Sea Lemon, Seattle’s Natalie Lew crafts outwardly bubbly dream pop underlined by a subtle snarl. This sound is at its finest on her new EP, Stop At Nothing, announced today, to be released August 25 on Luminelle Recordings. Lew’s latest single, “Vaporized,” finds her formula at its peppiest. Springy and uptempo, the summery song is carried by jangling guitars and reverb-drenched vocals that come together to evoke acts like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Launder. “Vaporized” is accompanied by an ominous, campy video, filmed around Seattle, directed by Otium + Lew herself. The track follows recently-released shoegazey single, “Cellar.”  On the track, Lew offers: ""Vaporized" was the first song I wrote that I knew specifically would be for the new EP. The song is all about my personal health anxieties and fear of death, which is something I’ve dealt with since I was little. The chorus’ “I thought he was buried alive/out of my mind/I thought she was vaporized/out of my mind” is playing on the most unlikely, almost impossible ways to die because I think making light of my personal anxieties can help me from spiraling. I have insomnia a lot and wake up in the middle of the night, and used to have this tendency to read headlines while I was awake (a terrible idea), wondering if some horrible accident might happen to me too. The song instrumentally gets a little heavier and more intense each chorus, which implies this impending doom feeling that gets worse and worse as I worry."  On the video: "Alex (Otium) and I shot the video over a weekend in Seattle this summer. In the video, I'm playing two characters—an unknowing protagonist that's been allured to dark magic, and the allurer, who is this mysterious other character in a nightgown, red gloves and a mask. The song and video as a whole are meant to represent how uncomfortable it is confronting one's fear of the unknown, and the video pulls on these classic, campy thriller movie tropes that remind me of being a kid and watching the old VHS player in my playroom. I wanted to step out of my own comfort zone with this video, and do something a little more conceptual and weirder that felt like an honest depiction of Vaporized core themes."   All her life, Natalie Lew had been a music fan, but she never envisioned herself gracing the stage as a musician. Growing up in Seattle, Lew was raised on local cultural touchstones like the Capitol Hill Block Party, KEXP, and the Museum of Pop Culture's annual Sound Off (Battle of the Bands), which led her to believe she’d pursue a career working for a label, maybe as an A&R rep, anything to keep in close proximity with the thing she loved most. Though Lew grew up playing the piano, that was the extent of her musical prowess, at least until she moved to New York and started playing a roommate’s guitars, which led to playing rhythm guitar in a friend’s band. The experience opened up a new future for Lew who returned to the Pacific Northwest in the early days of the pandemic and, in isolation, wrote her very first songs which were released as an EP, Close Up, in 2022 under the moniker Sea Lemon in homage to the acid-yellow sea slugs who populate the waters of the Puget Sound. Now signed to Luminelle, Sea Lemon will debut a new EP, Stop at Nothing, on August 25, 2023. While Close Up was what Lew calls a “grab bag” of tracks she’d made while figuring out her unique sound, Stop at Nothing establishes Sea Lemon’s take on the dreampop aesthetics she grew up loving. “I call it Costco Cocteau Twins,” Lew says. “It’s a modern spin on classic dreampop and shoegaze.” To make the collection, Lew collaborated with Jackson Phillips (aka Day Wave) who co-wrote some of the songs and can be heard singing on the sweeping duet “Breakdown,” a downbeat call-and-response chronicling the petty desire to see someone who’s wronged you fail. When she’s not making music, Lew is an accomplished designer and tends to describe her music visually. “I’m not a synesthete, but I think about color a lot. Close Up was all light blues and yellows, an airy pastel palette. Stop at Nothing is dark red and night blue, it has its moments of brightness and levity, but it’s another side of me.”

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