Sea Lemon is Writing Shoegaze for the Sentimental
Photo credit: Rachel Bennett
On Diving For A Prize, Seattle-based artist Sea Lemon—also known as Natalie Lew—dives deep beneath the surface of hazy nostalgia, dream-pop melodies, and uncanny emotional vignettes. Her debut LP, released via Luminelle Records, brims with shimmering guitar tones and luminous vocal textures, placing her alongside the shoegaze revival while carving out something undeniably her own: a sound that flirts with fantasy but never fully escapes the emotional realities of life.
If that sounds like a tightrope walk, it is! But Lew balances it with grace. Her songs are rich with wistful longing, a bit of surrealist mischief, and what she herself calls “shoegaze 101:” accessible, melodic, and tinged with melancholy, but without the full-on noise wall often associated with the genre. Think of it as dream-pop with a designer’s sense of composition. It is structured, deliberate, and emotionally intuitive.
Diving For A Prize by Sea Lemon.
Take the album artwork for example, painted by Elly Minagawa: it’s wispy, ethereal, with a hand holding an apple reminiscent of the Twilight book cover. It has a fantasy-meets-medieval energy to it that could easily double as the art for a Magic the Gathering card or your favourite teen novel. It can be whatever you want it to be, much like the songs themselves. “I wanted the painting and the artwork to feel representative of my music and not just like representative of me,” Lew says, referencing the album cover’s fantastical imagery: a candle, a grasshopper, a rotten apple. “It’s like magical realism with normal objects. Things you recognize, but with an airy twist.”
Lew didn’t even start singing until 2020. It wasn’t until a pandemic return to her hometown of Seattle—after living in New York and briefly playing guitar in a band—that she began crafting songs as a solo artist. Sea Lemon was less a master plan and more a creative lifeline during a period of uncertainty. “It was born not out of having an extreme vision for a solo career,” she explains, “but more from being bored and isolated and wanting something to put my brain to.”
Four years later, she’s sharing stages with some of the very bands that shaped her musical world, like American Football, and collaborating with Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, who guests on the track “Crystals.” “He’s a master of his craft,” Lew says. “He came into the studio, sang it twice. Sounded perfect. The song was done. It was so cool to watch.”
That sense of awe threads through much of Diving For A Prize, not just in the collaborators or the sound, but in the way Lew approaches songwriting. Her lyrics often stem from imagined narratives, unreliable narrators, or quirky character studies, like “Sweet Anecdote,” about someone who becomes emotionally unhinged after a fleeting encounter. “Have I personally stalked someone? No,” she laughs. “But I love stories where the protagonist doesn’t realize they’re doing something wild. That unreliable narrator lens lets me write songs that are relatable without being entirely autobiographical.”
Photo credit: Rachel Bennett
Lew’s creative background is in design and she still works as a designer by day, which also informs her approach to building the album’s world. “I’m very project-minded,” she says. “I give myself timelines like ‘Now it’s time to make a demo, now it’s time to flesh it out, now it’s time to hit the studio.’” That balance between vision and discipline, fantasy and structure, shows up not just in her process but in the songs themselves, many of which feel like dreamy snapshots of characters at emotional crossroads.
The title track reflects this blend of whimsy and intensity: Diving For A Prize is a metaphor for going to “unrealistic, crazy depths” to attain something meaningful - whether that’s love, validation, or a glimmer of clarity. “Even if it means burning bridges along the way,” Lew adds. “It’s about reaching for that last morsel of something sweet.”
Produced by Andy Park (Death Cab for Cutie, Deftones), the album drips with reverb-laced guitars, gauzy textures, and glistening melodies that take cues from Enya, The Sundays, and Caroline Polachek. Lew’s voice floats above it all in a serene, shapeshifting, and emotive way. “Enya is such a big inspiration,” she says. “The airiness of her melodies—how she uses her voice like an instrument—really shaped how I approached my own vocals.”
Though deeply nostalgic, Diving For A Prize isn’t retro cosplay. It nods to the past while pushing the shoegaze/dream-pop genre into something more emotionally direct, more narratively textured. Her recent support slots with American Football and Death Cab are not just career milestones, but more like symbolic torch passes. Sea Lemon doesn’t just remind you of those bands; she’s part of what comes next. “I remember listening to Plans as a teenager and thinking, ‘Now this is music,’” she says. “So to be on stage with Ben, or playing those shows, it’s surreal. It’s slow but fast. Like if I were 18 and saw where I’m at now, I’d be like— ‘That’s crazy.’”
While her sound often feels like it floats just above reality, Lew remains deeply grounded in the Seattle music community. She’s quick to shout out local peers like dream-pop outfit Coral Grief —“they’re incredible, and I would love to do a show with them” —and longtime favourite Tomo Nakayama who will be playing with Sea Lemon at her headlining date in Seattle. “I’ve been listening to Tomo’s music for years,” she says.
There’s no shortage of standout tracks on the album, including “Silver,” a song about childhood dreams, disillusionment, and rediscovering hope. “With these songs,” Lew says, “I wanted to find a place for myself in the world.” Whether she’s drawing on personal anecdotes or imagined storylines, Sea Lemon’s music resonates in a way that feels oddly universal, wistful, warm, and just a little bit weird. In other words, the perfect soundtrack for feeling everything, all at once.
Sea Lemon will be celebrating her album release at a hometown show in Seattle, WA on Friday August 8, 2025. For more information and tickets, visit www.sealemonmusic.com.
