Those among us who harbour a secret fondness for ‘Be Prepared’ – Jeremy Irons’ delicious villain song in The Lion King – may well have pricked their ears last October when Hemlocke Springs released her single ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles’. It’s a demented tune, opening with a sped-up Nutcracker tinkle that gives way to an infectious romp, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects and ripe, expressive vocals: a song that sounds a bit like Scar on steroids, or Scar if he was releasing pop music from his lion’s cave in 2026.
The song’s nursery-rhyme-meets-antiquated-fetish title harks at some of the themes on its parent album, The Apple Tree Under The Sea, debut long-player from Hemlocke Springs. That album title, along with the Hemlocke Springs moniker itself (her real name is Isimeme “Naomi” Udu), together evoke a scene halfway between Disneyland and some surreal medieval artwork. Yet this is music that could only exist in the 2020s.
The songs on The Apple Tree Under The Sea are baroque, technicolour confections that make up a realm that is entirely Udu’s own, like a child let loose with the rosebud cheat code on The Sims. Part fairytale soundscape (there are hooves on cobblestones, and so many princess-like gasps you almost expect to hear Shrek and Donkey join in on backing vocals at some point), part 1980s synth-pop banquet, part 2010s alt-pop renaissance (think Marina and the Diamonds or Rina Sawayama), it’s potently sweet, yes, but with an idiosyncrasy that cuts through: a Disney soundtrack that’s actually bearable.
Udu is not your average pop act: she grew up in Concord, North Carolina, in an extremely Christian household, the child of Nigerian immigrant parents. An undergraduate degree in biology followed by a masters degree in health informatics from Dartmouth broadened her social horizons. At the same time, she was playing around on Garageband and Logic, and her 2022 single ‘Girlfriend’ turned out to be the viral key that unlocked the princess’s bedroom door.
Now she’s the sort of artist who’s fluent at TikTok, interviewed by Vogue, and releases exclusive vinyl versions for Urban Outfitters. Hemlocke Springs has opened for stadium-sized acts such as Chappell Roan and Conan Gray, and slightly more offbeat artists such as Doja Cat and Ashnikko. She can count Grimes and Doechii among her fans. The latter said of ‘Girlfriend’, “this song is not even of this time. It surpasses this time.” Her music plumbs days of yore for inspiration, yet it feels forward-facing. A woman armed with a laptop and an imagination – a Black, queer woman, no less, of which there aren’t many in the indie pop world, a fact Udu says she “feels severely”.
The Apple Tree Under The Sea ventures far beyond bland bedroom pop, as Udu undertakes a quest of self-discovery she describes as “unpacking the consequences of the religious bubble I grew up in”. After opening track ‘The Red Apple’ – more introductory chant than actual song, on which she contemplates taking a bite of the tasty-looking fruit of sinful worldly knowledge – comes ‘The Beginning Of The End’, written seven years ago when she was still at university, questioning her religion and her sexuality as her world expanded. “Sometimes I wish that I could be / the company of pretty girls and pretty boys,” she ponders.
The aforementioned, bonkers ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles’ is the sound of letting off steam in the face of a proposed life in servitude to husband and children. ‘W-w-w-w-w’ – presumably the who-what-where-when-why of storytelling – was “inspired by a documentary my mother watched when I was in high school about this 73-year-old man who decided to marry a 17-year-old girl from the Philippines,” Udu explains. The song’s protagonist can’t bear to fathom waking up her elderly husband on a Sunday, making him breakfast, looking him in the eyes and having to pronounce desire for him.
On ‘Moses’, Udu is overwhelmed by the fruits that grow beyond religious confines, but on following track ‘Sense(is)’ she tucks into that apple, and by the next track, R&B-adjacent ‘Set Me Free’, she’s singing about sex, as waves lap and synths squelch.
The entire album is a feast for the senses, its production DIY yet lush, kitsch yet rich. There are plenty of laptop keyboard-generated noises, sure, but sometimes those noises sound like A-ha at their comic-strip best – as on ‘Sever the Blight’, a single released almost three years ago and set in a love-starved basement – and sometimes they sound like boisterous breakdowns. ‘W-w-w-w-w’ opens with a very British-sounding siren that transforms seamlessly into synth beats as the song plunges into a thick forest of digital sounds, human grunts, and trip-hop beats, Udu’s Prince-like vocals cutting a path to a classic pop chorus. ‘Moses’ also turns more straightforwardly pop, after layered a cappella vocals open proceedings like a church choir.
When she’s not evoking the Purple One, Udu’s vocals mutate all over the shop, one minute an almost gratingly chatty cartoon – like a toddler testing boundaries – the next unhinged and on the cusp of breaking, a reedy thinness that contrasts with her lush instrumentals. But that eccentricity suits her lyricism. She’s unlike most pop lyricists in today’s era of “I wanna dance to me, me, me, me, me / when I go to the club, club, club, club, club”. Udu writes not like a brat partygirl but like an outraged fifteenth-century maiden, floral and wordy, singing of “the tenebrous festered corners of your bed” on ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles’, before going on to declare, “with all the choler and vexation that he rankled / you’d think I’d find the strength to chop his little man!”
‘Sense(is)’ is a standout track, opening with strings and massed gasps, giving way to more glimpses of mainstream pop in the chorus. It could be on a Radio 1 playlist in an alternate universe (or even this one). “I took the wrong turn down to Hollywood and now I’ll turn forever,” sings Udu. We may assume she liked the taste of the apple, then.
On final track ‘Be the Girl!’, a power ballad about knowing your true self, Hemlocke Springs is back to Disney territory. And who can blame her? To hear an artist have fun with her music, with almost childlike delight, not boxed in by trends or an obligation to be “cool” – it’s a lovely thing to witness. And with bursts of throbbing arpeggios and an enormous final key change, we’re reminded that this isn’t Scar’s cave, or The Sims – it’s the world of Hemlocke Springs, pop’s only medieval princess for the digital age.
