REVIEW: Look At Her, Wow, There She Goes - Emei Takes Off with New EP ‘RABBITHOLE’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY NICO CHODOR ☆
Photo By Jordan Knight
PLEASE CHECK YOUR COAT AT THE DOOR – before descending into wonderland with Emily Li. Long-standing Asian American Queen of Hearts, professionally known as Emei, she has made leaps and bounds since placing third on “Chinese Idol” at 15 years old, taste-testing teen popstardom in China, and then more recently graduating from Yale. She learned how to sing and perform in predominantly Chinese American spaces and has spoken highly of her immigrant parents, to whom she owes so much of her professional climb in the music industry.
RABBITHOLE marks the highly anticipated peek through the looking glass, in particular regarding Li’s more personal struggles with anxiety. “Each song is a different room in my brain,” she says of the EP, which bespeaks high-energy pop production to make her presence known. Emei, named for the crossover between her English nickname Emmy, and Chinese name An Mei, aims to break through on this latest installment.
Track one starts by falling hard and fast against electronic pop percussion: “Rabbithole” is meant to simulate the nature of an anxiety attack, one that even diaphragmatic breathing exercises cannot foil. “Superstars are made before they’re 20,” panics Emei, while production spirals, similar to the way in which Alice herself changes in size down the rabbit hole at the story’s inception. She is shrinking and growing while pushing forward into whatever comes next, hence the immersive sense of confronting chaos on this opening number. “Rabbithole” conveys visions of running late for a very important date, getting lost, or falling behind in the labyrinth of adulthood.
From panic to slowed-down jazz turned alt-pop, producer Timfromthehouse (Tove Lo, 5SOS) makes things interesting on track two, “All These Kids.” Think funhouse, Mad Hatter-style unpredictability that gets curiouser and curiouser. “I imagine there being two of me in this song,” explains Emei, “one scared while watching and listening to this confident version of me, and the other on a throne screaming at the other.” The lyrics are confident, but all over the place, symbolic of the Red Queen herself.
Emei’s first ever acoustic drop comes next, and she has likened it to the smallest form of Alice lost in the forest. “9 Lives” is about the fear of one day never playing another show, and the paranoia that everyone she loves most, fans included, may one day give up. For me, this track is most significant, I think because there is so much pressure and anxiety surrounding ever being enough – especially as a femme-identifying listener, and a Chinese American one, too. Stripped down and pensive, this ballad breathes comfort into the impossibility of Asian girlhood, almost as if to say “We’re all mad here.”
The EP’s focus track, “Sugarcoat,” picks things right back up with a snap, blending vocals like NIKI with Sabrina Carpenter-like lyricism, to poke fun at the sophistic nature of dating in your twenties. This is meant to be the tea party of the project, which if you recall from the movie/novel, blows traditional social norms completely out of the water. Time is meaningless in this scene, conversations are riddled, and Alice more or less gets a break from normal rituals of politeness. Emei follows suit here, no longer drowning in her tears, but rather embracing the classic pop fun of keeping things sweet, like sugar. “It’s not that deep,” she reminds herself on track four, for boys are the simplest of creatures, and when life gets you down, there’s no harm in playing the game (a.k.a. lying to men) for a bit of a pick-me-up.
Production from Boyblue (Suki Waterhouse) spurs Emei from wonderland onto RABBITHOLE’s conclusion “The Part,” with punchy electronic dance beats to undergird the full breadth of Li’s coming of age. She has climbed her way back to reality, embracing what it means to have this opportunity – the chance to give music her all: “You’re only young once. Honey, don’t waste it,” soars Emei. She embraces the role of professional musician with a grain of salt, however, making note of the pressure to act a certain way or water herself down for the comfort of other people. If anything, the lyrics spotlight the clarity she has gained in the industry thus far, and her determination to make the little girl in her proud.
Ultimately, her journey through wonderland resembles the nonsensical shift into adulthood, one that can so easily feel like a downward spiral into anxious attachment if only you think back to Alice. “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,” writes Lewis Carroll, and RABBITHOLE spotlights the unique significance of Emei’s present moment. Directors Bryant Hun and Nick Jandora bring the moment to life, conjoining all five songs into the full visualizer below.
She will be taking the EP on tour through Europe and the States as of February 2025, spanning 37 shows and a stop at London’s Heaven.
Photo By Jordan Knight
