North Carolina · synth-pop · art-pop

Hemlocke Springs

2 upcoming festivals

Gleefully off-kilter synth-pop — the med-school-dropout-to-viral-star pipeline, '80s drama sung with total abandon, homemade pop that sounds like nobody else's.

Hemlocke Springs is the recording name of Isimeme Naomi Diamond, a North Carolina musician who began releasing music while enrolled in a graduate health-informatics programme. Her song "girlfriend" spread widely on TikTok in 2022, and she followed it with "gimme all ur luv," which drew attention from Grimes among others.

Her songs are largely self-produced and built from bright, brittle synthesizers, drum-machine patterns and vocal lines that swing between deadpan delivery and full-throated melodrama. The reference points run to 1980s new wave and synth-pop, but the arrangements stay deliberately homemade and unpolished, with abrupt structural turns rather than conventional pop scaffolding.

synth-popart-pop