On May 30, 2025, Sea Lemmon, the project of Natalie Lew will release her full-length debut, Diving For A Prize, via Luminelle Recordings (Munya, Magdalena Bay). The record is inspired by life in the Pacific Northwest. Ahead of the album’s arrival, Sea Lemmon shares the LP track “Cynical.” “Say you’re getting cynical feel like I told you that I’m in a trench / Right on the outskirts while you’re on the edge / How far will you let it go?,” she sings on the chorus. Lew has collaborated with Ben Gibbard and recently toured with American Football.

Sea Lemmon on “Cynical”:

“A lot of this record feels like a step in a new but related sonic direction for me. ‘Cynical’ is the song that feels the most connected to some of my former music, like the song Vaporized, and is about the feeling of being all the way in on a relationship while sensing someone is on their way out.”

Diving For A Prize was mainly produced and fleshed out in the studio with Lew’s collaborator Andy Park (Death Cab For Cutie, Deftones) in Park’s home studio in Seattle. Lew herself grew up playing piano, but became more actively engaged with music when she joined the programming board of her college at the University of Washington where she was studying design. Always consuming new music, it wasn’t until a stint in New York where she picked up a guitar for the first time, briefly joining a band with her roommates before moving back to the West Coast in 2020. This newfound period of isolation allowed her to experiment with Logic and create music on her own. “I never heard myself sing until 2020,” she admits. The resulting EPs Close Up and Stop At Nothing represent these first forays as a solo musician, but although Lew has always highlighted the intentional departure between the sonic semi-brightness of her music and its darker subject matter, Diving For A Prize fully submerges into fuzzier territory and murkier impulses.

“When I make a song I think of it as its own little universe,” Lew explains. Inspired by artists like Enya, Caroline Palochek, Air and My Bloody Valentine, Lew’s “shoegaze but with pop structures” songs have a knack to be earworm-y when you least expect it, embedding themselves in the listener’s psyche. Intentionally amorphous, often what seems like a straightforward chord progression dissolves into something more insidious after multiple listens. Her voice can sound sweetly saccharine until you listen to the lyrics, which often tell vaguely sinister tales and reflect scenes where the mundane takes a turn. Lew writes short stories in her spare time, and her eye for curious vignettes is reflected in Diving For A Prize, which often sees her characters going through minute challenges or uncomfortable scenarios, like in the disarmingly ominous “Rear View,” which features a baseball player who is on the periphery of not making the next season. For this is what life is like – “tragic, sweet, comedic,” Lew says: all of the things at once.

Pre-order Diving For A Prize HERE