When Natalie Lew launched her solo project, Sea Lemon, she wasn’t trying to impress anyone. “When I released my first couple songs, it was honestly just for fun,” she says. “I had no thought about reaching a wide audience or a bigger demographic other than my friends, really.” Now, with her debut full-length album, Diving for a Prize, under her belt, the rising shoegaze/dream-pop artist has opened for major acts like Death Cab for Cutie and American Football and is signed to Luminelle Recordings, the indie label known for putting alt-pop duo Magdalena Bay on the map.

Lew first picked up her roommate’s electric guitar while living in New York and began playing rhythm guitar in a Brooklyn-based grunge/dream-pop band called Climates about a month later. In 2020, she and her now-fiancé moved back to her hometown of Seattle; she started Sea Lemon as a way to entertain herself during the pandemic and make use of the minimal equipment she’d acquired.

She found she enjoyed the increased creative control that she had working by herself and ended up putting out her first music video, “Sunday,” shot on an iPhone, to showcase her new pastime to friends and family. Soon, she had amassed a “mound of songs” and began to attract unexpected interest from small labels. Lew cheekily refers to her music as “Costco Cocteau Twins,” likening it to a Pacific Northwest–bred budget version of the seminal Scottish dream-pop trio. Other influences include the Cure, Enya, Caroline Polachek, Air, and My Bloody Valentine, as well as the shoegaze group Nothing, and Danish artists like ML Buch and Astrid Sonne.

Diving for a Prize, which came out in June, features shimmery, swirling sonic landscapes that blend darkness with brightness, melding sinister lyrics with dreamy, jangly synths and ethereal vocals. Lew likes the complexity this balance of opposites brings: “Mixing those feels important to me, to have any kind of nuance.” She worked with engineer/producer Andy Park, whose credits include Death Cab for Cutie and Deftones, at his West Seattle home studio the Crumb, along with Sheridan Riley of Alvvays on drums.

By day, Lew—who studied design at University of Washington—works as a graphic designer, and her sharp visual eye plays a central role in her music. Images are often the first things that come to her when writing a song. While working on Diving for a Prize, she kept returning to the concept of a humanoid alien’s first time on Earth.

About a year and a half ago, she fell in love with Los Angeles painter Elly Minagawa’s work at a First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square, and the artist became a muse who helped her define a more surreal, dreamlike sound. “In some ways, I think songs like ‘Silver’ and ‘Blue Moon’ off of my album were inspired by how eerily iridescent some of her paintings are,” she says. Later, she tapped Minagawa to paint the cover for Diving for a Prize, and the two worked together to create a hazy, psychedelic vision. Newfound access to a variety of synths at Park’s studio also shaped her album.

Lew writes short fiction in her free time, and her love of literature bleeds into her music. She hopes to release a short story collection within the next five years and would love to cowrite songs with an author. She cites Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, Emma Cline, and Joan Didion as some of her favorite writers and is particularly fascinated with obsessive female antiheroes and messy, absurdist narratives about characters finding themselves. “That pathway being kind of uncomfortable and weird and doing crazy things, that is so compelling to me as a songwriter,” she says. Her song “Sweet Anecdote” imagines an ambiguous, stalkerish speaker (“You were the one / Knew from the start / God I was so / Sure when I saw / You in your car”). “Stay” recalls an elderly security guard she saw sleeping on a couch in a Capitol Hill thrift store, while “Rear View” tells the story of a doomed baseball player.

As her stage name would suggest, the ocean is another major source of aesthetic inspiration for Lew, who appreciates that it symbolizes the unknown lurking beneath a placid surface. As a kid, she spent many hours at the sea due to her mom’s involvement with the volunteer program at a local aquarium. She dreamed of becoming a marine biologist and of discovering a giant squid someday. “I grew up tidepooling a lot and loving the ocean, and some of the stuff [you find] is kind of disgusting-looking in a really beautiful way,” she says. “Even sea anemones and sea stars, when the water goes down and they’re all slimy-looking, it’s so beautiful and so scary. I think that feels so emblematic of my music—something beautiful, light, and pretty, but also freaky and spooky.”

Lew is a devoted horror fan and admits that the classic 1990 Stephen King adaptation Misery is her “comfort movie.” “My fiancé is at the point where he’s like, ‘Can we please not watch it again?’” she says, laughing. She’s influenced by contemporary horror films like Midsommar and says pop allows her to sneak some of the “unlikable protagonists” and darker, more subversive themes of horror into a more widely accessible medium.

For the single “Crystals,” she collaborated with Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, who reached out after they performed at a benefit show together. Lew sent him the chorus and bridge of the song, which presents a haunting, cynical take on manifestation and New Age culture: “I keep waiting on the line for a sound / Throwing crystals at the wall, all around.” Gibbard replied with some lines about depression—“It seems that all I wanna do is sleep these days / And wake up in about a year and not feel this way.”

As far as upcoming plans go, Lew has a short film inspired by Diving for a Prize coming out this summer. She’ll also headline the Tractor Tavern in August, supported by singer-songwriter Nathan Reed and local indie favorite Tomo Nakayama. 

She’s come a long way since her early days of writing in isolation, and encourages anyone interested in making music to just dive in, the way she did. “It sounds simple, but a lot of the time I hear friends or people I know being like, ‘I’m almost done with the song, but it’s not perfect,’ or ‘Oh, we recorded it, but it’s 5 BPM too fast, we’ve got to rerecord,’” she says. “What’s the risk of just releasing something that you like? Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s out there.” 

Sea Lemon plays Tractor Tavern with Tomo Nakayama and Nathan Reed Fri Aug 8, 8 pm, 21+.