Emory’s Post-TikTok Pop

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

When Emory Wellons started learning how to make it in the music industry at the start of this decade, the industry was experiencing a technological spasm. Suddenly, an addictive app called TikTok was the most powerful tool for young musicians looking to spread their sounds fast and far. In the fall of 2021, during her sophomore year at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, the burgeoning artist and producer witnessed this phenomenon up-close when a classmate, Sadie Jean, amassed millions of views after uploading part of a weepy original song to the platform. Emory, who’s been playing drums since she was 10, even sat behind the kit at Jean’s first solo show as the song was going viral. She recognized most of that night’s crowd of around 30 people from school, but also noticed a handful of strangers. Who are these people? Emory thought, perplexed by the smattering of unfamiliar TikTok fans. By now, Sadie Jean has nearly a million followers on the app and more than 400 million Spotify streams, and has played to arenas as an opening act.

While many young artists would be psyched by the idea of a friend in the dorm next to theirs dropping out of school and signing a crazy record deal after their 30-second snippet blew up overnight, the whole thing terrified Emory. She played drums on tour for another friend who had gone viral, but she felt weary after seeing the amount of time and thought this friend had to devote to the content being created around her music, like planning how a show’s lighting would look when filmed on a phone. “It’s so cool that my friends are able to do what they love, but it was also a stark reality of like: I don’t want my career to look like that,” Emory says. “The more the TikTok thing happened, the more I was scared of it. I saw how that had to become their job, and that made me nervous. I felt more and more grateful that that didn’t happen to me, and that I was able to keep studying.”

Emory tells me this from her sparse apartment in L.A., where she moved after graduating last spring in search of steady production and session work. Behind her is an old-timey tennis racket (“I played in middle school and I was not awesome”), four guitar necks, a wrestler action figure, and a mug with horses on it. There are some errant drums strewn in the corner, and a ’90s-era Björk poster on the wall. Peering into her laptop’s camera, the 23-year-old—whose name really is Emory, though her friends call her Emma—is composed and endearingly geeky, every so often nudging her thick black glasses back up her nose.

After spending years in the background of other people’s projects as a producer and drummer, Emory finally mustered the confidence to release her own music last spring. And she knew what she should do to get it out there: make some TikToks. At first, her general attitude to such bite-sized self-promotion was, I can’t stand this, and it makes me sad. Sometimes she looked a little awkward and embarrassed in her videos, all too aware of the game she was being forced to play. But other times she looked like she was genuinely having fun, like one where she’s seen slouching on a couch before a friend surprises her by jumping into her lap from what seems like a great height. Some of her favorites are the ones she and her friends shot in nature—where she’s nearly out of the frame next to a pond or some chickens, or dwarfed by a postcard sunset—with the trappings of modernity nowhere to be seen. She started to figure out how to make shameless marketing feel not-so-shameless, for both her and the people on the other side of the screen.

So when one of her DIY TikToks flashed onto my feed last summer, I was intrigued. Soon enough, I was waking up with the snippet of her song “Tooth” rattling around my skull. The full song is even better—like if the Postal Service went hyperpop, filled with grabby production flourishes that make the whole thing feel positively 3D. “Tooth” did OK on TikTok—Emory’s videos featuring the song have collected around 65,000 plays—but it didn’t take off like crazy. Which is just as well. Because as the TikTok era looks to be coming to a close thanks to a U.S. ban, here’s a musician whose artistic aims and ethics buck against the brain rot and frictionless disposability of today’s endless scroll. 

Soon after she released “Tooth” and started floating a few other songs around to friends in the industry, labels she had followed for years were emailing her record deals. “Every major label, every indie label, it was just everyone reaching out—from a big-dog A&R person at Columbia to a Clive freshman that wanted to manage me,” she says, still stunned. “Tooth” was also added to Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlist, which has north of 1.2 million followers. “By no means is it a huge commercial success,” she says of the song, which, by now, has collected nearly 200,000 streams on Spotify, “but it hit the right ears.”

However shocked by the initial response, after learning about the music industry for four years, she was prepared for the opportunities suddenly coming her way. Rather than gunning for a huge advance that would be almost impossible to pay back, she was looking for something financially sustainable, and for people who understand what she and her collaborative group of friends are trying to do creatively. “How can we bring on a team that is excited about the music—not how it will perform on TikTok but how it will resonate with people and how it can create community?” she remembers thinking. She decided to forgo the major-label offers (“Absolutely not—it would not be beneficial to either of us”) and released three more songs over the course of 2024, each one showing off her range as a songwriter and producer, in partnership with the boutique labels Good Boy and Neon Gold. 

On the surface, “Tooth” is as fizzy as a bottle of seltzer that’s been rolling around the backseat for hours. But the lyrics are surprisingly dark, nodding to corrosive masculinity and familial trauma. “Hated when you said I looked pretty,” Emory sings. “Hated when you looked just like me.” Emory herself didn’t fully grasp the song’s devastating undercurrent until about a month after she completed it. She sent it to her girlfriend at the time, who cried and told her, “This is so upsetting.” Emory says her music often serves as an emotional crystal ball, revealing difficult feelings: “It’s almost like playing psychic with myself.” 

“Tooth” includes seemingly playful Biblical imagery—“What if I nailed up my hands to a piece of wood?/Is it cool if I do?”—that becomes less playful once you learn Emory grew up in a deeply religious household in the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee. Her father was a pastor at a local church, and Emory spent her teens playing drums for as many as 500 people during Sunday service. (“It was like contemporary rock but not as cool,” she says, talking about the church band’s Coldplay-lite style.) She describes the church as very conservative but “not like the fucking ones that are in the scary documentaries on HBO.” Still, she admits her father could be intimidating. “He would be homophobic and misogynistic and all of the scary Christian conservative things, and justify it by being someone following God,” she says. “In the last years I was living at home, there was so much agreeing to disagree, because I didn’t want to cry from a conversation with him again. And now I don’t have the energy for that anymore.”

Emory largely stopped engaging with religion a few years ago, around the same time she fully came to terms with her queerness. As a teenager, she struggled with depression and anxiety, in part because she didn’t have the language to explain her feelings. “I never even entertained the idea of sexuality at all, because sexuality was a sin,” she recalls. “Understanding my queer identity will always be a very fluid thing, but looking back I’m like, How was I not in touch with myself enough to realize this? It’s crazy what an environment like that can do to lock off parts of your brain.” (Her parents, she makes clear, appreciate and love the person she has become.)

Just as Emory was experiencing this personal awakening, she was also going through a musical one. When she started making her own songs and messing with the digital audio workstation Logic in high school, she was mostly mimicking some of her favorite indie-pop groups like Haim and Alvvays. “I was listening to Taylor Swift but wanted to be a cool indie rocker like Snail Mail,” she says. She loved to tinker with reverb, compression, and whatever plugins she could find, but was too scared to play her music for anyone. When she started college, she still had a capitalistic view of pursuing music as a competition and a way to fit into what’s popular. But that changed in her junior year, when she was given the chance to study abroad.

In Berlin, she took a class called Experiments in the Future of Producing, taught by the composer and sound artist Jane Arnison. The eureka moment came when Emory played Arnison the admittedly unoriginal music she had made thus far. “It was just so obviously me trying to replicate other artists, to be something that I wasn’t,” Emory recalls. Arninson responded with a simple question: “Do you like doing that?” No one had asked her that before. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t. I get really stressed out and feel like I’m failing all the time.’ And she was like, ‘What if you just didn’t think about where you want to end up? If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, why are you doing it?’” To this day, those words still ring in Emory’s head.

After that conversation, she started working on a song called “Double Dog,” which eventually became her second single. It’s another sparkling mix of heavy and light—weightless drum and guitar loops mixed with goofy barking samples and lyrics that dance around issues of codependency and misaligned attachment. When she began creating that track, she remembers thinking, I don’t know what this is, but it feels like the most me thing I’ve ever made.

So far, Emory’s sound is defined by a seamless combination of analog and digital, smoothness and texture, raw emotion and distorted effects. During our video call, she shows me an old Tascam recorder she bought for cheap, and lights up when talking about how she plans to fix the belts to get it into working shape. “I really love the idea of finding weird ways to make electronic music more live and organic,” she says, adding that she’s been listening to artists who are great at smudging those same lines, like Sassy 009, ML Buch, and Astrid Sonne.

Emory’s other couple of songs thus far are more low-key than her first two but no less arresting, hinting at her music’s limitless future. “Moth” is an abstract snapshot of her first real love, with images of cold rain and cold sweats atop a musical backdrop that morphs from digital folk to swarming techno. “It remains mysterious to me, and it’s my favorite for that exact reason,” she says. “Watering Can” slowly blooms as it weaves staticky field recordings with dejected fingerpicked guitar and carefully stacked vocals; it’s about the aftermath of anxiety, the exhale that comes after you fully give yourself to someone else and realize it’s still not enough.

Along with working on new music, Emory is planning to build up her live show in 2025. She played her first-ever solo performance last month in L.A. and sent me some videos from it afterward. The scruffy clips—which were sent as email attachments, not social media links—were shot from the middle of the crowd, with bobbing heads blocking part of the stage. They are shaky, and not lit particularly well. In one, Emory is seated, with headphones on, playing “Watering Can.” “This is what you wanted,” she sings, her voice haloed by heavenly effects, “Well, babe, you got it.”

Below is a playlist Emory compiled for us featuring songs that have been influential to her as of late, available to paying Hearing Things subscribers only. If you have yet to sign up, please consider it—your support allows us to go in-depth on fascinating new artists and so much more.