Emory’s Post-TikTok Pop
Here’s an impressive young artist who would much rather spend time building a real-life community around her work than figure out how to promote herself online.
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.
