Dev Lemons is done chasing love gone sour

Nearby is an enormous hamburger-shaped rug hanging on the wall, an object she refuses to include among the clutter. “The burger rug gives me so much use every time I look at it,” she insists. “It’s like pure bliss.” Whether intentional or not, the decoration has a menacing counterpart in her video for “eat the pavement”, where Lemons is served a grotesque, googly-eyed hamburger at a garden party populated by animal-headed guests, only to look at it in disgust and bat it away.

We’ve come to know Dev Lemons staring out from behind enormous false eyelashes, towering blonde wigs, or clicking through a crudely rendered digital world like an unnervingly self-aware NPC. In her TikTok videos and lyric visualizers, she wanders through uncanny rooms, often falls from an endless sky, or is trapped within interfaces that recall the full-motion video and point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. Her work reminds me of unearthed footage from cult games such as Harvester or Dark Seed: low-budget, funny and dreamlike, but always at risk of tipping into nightmare territory.

More recently, that collision of seduction, absurdity, and horror has entered the mainstream through Obsession, a film to which Lemons’ followers immediately connected her work. “When Obsession first came out, a bunch of people commented, ‘They should have made you the Obsession girl,’” she laughs. After seeing the film herself, Lemons understood the comparison. “I was just like, ‘Damn, this is my reputation. I’m this crazy person.’ But I love it. I love that movie so much.” 

Lemons has been developing her own version of uncanny femininity through the “scary short films” she shares on TikTok. The videos initially resemble comedy sketches before slipping into analogue horror and clip-art animations that recall the unruly use of early Microsoft Windows. In her viral dinner-date series, Lemons emotionally whiplashes viewers through a simulated relationship in 83 seconds, ricocheting between wanting commitment, demanding reassurance, professing extravagant love, and ordering her unseen date to go away. It calls to mind the emotional ups and downs on her new album hunting what we already killed, as Lemons exaggerates the volatile emotions women are sometimes expected to suppress or dismiss as irrational for displaying. Another user sums it up nicely in the comment section of the video, saying: “This is what going on a date on 700mg of Benadryl feels like.”

Years earlier, Lemons and a collaborator made a series of vlogs in which they left different things cooking in an air fryer for around eight hours. While editing one of them, Lemons began rapidly scrubbing through the timeline and became fascinated by the jittery, fragmented effect it created. “I was like, ‘That’s so funny. I wish it just looked like that,’” she remembers. They realised that it could by screen-recording the footage as she dragged the playhead back and forth, they preserved the accidental distortion in the finished video. Years later, Lemons returned to that technique and began building entire videos around it, gradually developing the homemade point-and-click aesthetic that now distinguishes her online work.

“I’ve always been fascinated with posting weird shit online,” Lemons explains. Before TikTok, she experimented with shitposting on Twitter to promote her earliest songs. She also grew a following by making video content on YouTube, crafting covers of popular songs in real time without ever hearing them before, such as Charli xcx’s “Vroom Vroom” and “Get Got” by Death Grips. Music, however, was never an incidental extension of her online persona. “I’ve always wanted the music to be the centre of it,” she says. “I’ve always promoted my music in ways that felt natural to me. If I just posted the music, it didn’t feel natural. I’d always have to make a meme out of it or bury it in some sort of funny stuff.”

Her appearance is also part of that construction. Exaggerated eyelashes, theatrical makeup, and surreal fashion choices allow Lemons to slip more completely into the character the performance demands. “If I just look like myself, I’m a bit more awkward,” she says. “But if I look insane, I’m able to embody that sort of energy to perform the song well.”

Before the Dev Lemons moniker, she released songs as Miss iPad, retiring the name partly out of an ambitious fear that Apple might see a legal problem with it as her project became more successful. “I had to get ahead of it well before that happens,” she laughs. While the project initially began as a solo endeavor, during the pandemic she began working with producers and discovered how collaboration could expand her ideas. A lemon, she reasons, is fine by itself, but significantly better when mixed with other ingredients.

That approach is central to her second album, hunting what we already killed, created with producer Emmett Kai, co-owner of Unisex Records with electronic producer Nick Monaco. The pair connected in the comments beneath a post by Jordana, whose music Kai had previously produced. After Jordana encouraged them to collaborate, Lemons sent him a message. Two sessions later, she knew they needed to make an album.

Where 2025’s SURFACE TENSION frequently leaned towards pop and rap, hunting what we already killed pushes further into alternative rock without losing her signature sound. Lemons moved through successive listening obsessions while making it, from Radiohead and Deftones to Geese’s Cameron Winter, and a later stretch dominated by MexikoDro and ICYTWAT. While it’s clear she is not consciously imitating those references, the album’s heavier sound is what naturally happened when she and Kai entered a room together.

That meeting point can be heard across songs that pivot between intimate, R&B-inflected grooves and eruptions of distorted guitars or screams. On “eat the pavement”, Lemons seethes over bright, buoyant production that sounds like it features steel drums or a marimba, as she imagines banishing an ex’s letters to the basement, leaving him to wallow in the mess he created. Although “eat the pavement” sounds soft and almost cutesy, she describes its lyrics as firm and aggressive. “I also wanted the visualizer to communicate that, with a Happy Tree Friends-type vibe.” Multiple versions of Lemon are punched, flattened, and bonked over the head with everything from an oversized spoon to a guitar, leaving her sprawled quite literally across the pavement. Beneath the visualizer’s gleefully cheap graphics and slapstick brutality is a telling reversal as she sings “Don’t I always stay too long?”. Lemons may fantasise about punishing the person who hurt her, but she also recognises how remaining in the relationship caused her to participate in her own pain. Anyone who has remained in a situation long enough for affection to calcify into resentment will recognise the contradiction.

Written over roughly a year and a half, the album draws on personal experiences as Lemons sequences a relationship moving through its demise. In doing so, she sings about a shared emotional cycle as devotion gives way to bargaining, guilt, resentment, and, eventually, acceptance. 

The album opens with “only one way to know”, which sees Lemons at her most committed. “’Cause I just wanna be together, I’ll take my time / Never was such a lucky better, but what if you change your mind? / And you just wanna be together?” – from the start, we get a sense that something feels off here and a relationship really shouldn’t be this difficult. “let you” captures Lemons at her most consuming. Over a hazy alternative arrangement, Lemons imagines creating a celestial body for her significant other, wishing she could give them “a moon”, while calling their name every night. Even the song’s title evokes both the intimacy of letting someone in and the regret of having granted them that access. 

By “another word you say,” the album takes a heavier pivot. Lemons dismisses every excuse their significant other uses for mistreating them and grows tired of “their pouting, crying in the corner like a puppy,” before the song erupts into a screamed breakdown. Her third and final single, “Best Friend”, Lemons sings with a swagger that quickly dissolves into anguish, with a delivery that has inspired fans to lip-sync along with visible fury on TikTok. She keeps seeking an explanation for the ways she’s been wronged, capturing how empowerment can easily revert back into hurt, with healing never presented linearly across the album’s eleven tracks.

“It’s a recurring theme [on the album] of either me or another person chasing after something that’s not going to go anywhere,” Lemons says. “It’s done. We cooked it, so why do I really care so much?” The answer may be impossible to rationalise, but hunting what we already killed gives all that futile energy somewhere productive to go. Lemons hopes the record might accompany listeners through the same emotional turmoil she experienced while making it and sometimes the only way to stop hunting something already dead is to make art from what remains.