Back in May we wrote about ‘Cellar‘, the first single from Sea Lemon‘s upcoming EP Stop at Nothing on Luminelle Recordings. It saw the Seattle-based artist combine dream pop and shoegaze sensibilities to explore our sometimes unnerving fascination with unease. Drawing on classics of the horror and thriller genres such as Blow Out, Psycho and Misery, the song evoked that “compulsion to seek out the dark and disturbing aspects of life that’s often mirrored within the movies themselves,” as we put it. “Characters who allow their morbid curiosity to get the better of them, drifting toward what they already know to be bad news as though a certain inevitability exists within the situation.”
Sea Lemon has now shared the EP’s second single, ‘Vaporized’, a brighter song which nevertheless continues the release’s vivid, nocturnal palette, as well as a nuanced lyricism which owes as much to short fiction as it does its musical forebears. “Do you ever feel like you’re falling / I know I do,” sings Natalia Lew in the opening lines. “My body gets stuck underwater / I’m turning blue.”
It is this line between flat disaffection and overwhelming feelings, so typical of authors like Ottessa Moshfegh and Kathryn Scanlan, which lifts Sea Lemon above its contemporaries. A tone which allows Lew’s narrators to feel at once fearful and dangerous, some absence at the heart of their existence pushing them toward the darkest of places. “Sometimes when I struggle to sleep I / Look up the news,” she sings in the following verse, death as some night-visiting spectre. “See someone was caught in a landslide / Ripped them in two.”
I thought he was buried alive
Out of my mind
I thought she was vaporized
Out of my mind
As with the previous single, ‘Vaporized’ comes with a video to further its themes. This time directed by Otium and Lew herself, the film evokes classic slashers in all of their naivety and camp dread.
Stop at Nothing will be released on the 25th August via Luminelle Recordings and you can pre-order it now.
