REVIEW: Dev Lemon's "Delusional"

I have anticipated a proper, full project from musician and video essayist Dev Lemons for well over a year now. I’ve been following Dev’s SongPsych video series since 2021, where she tackles a topic in the music realm be it theory, industry or some other sort of topic or challenge and have enjoyed it for her humor, technical prowess and general personality. If you dig into her singles you’ll find that same charm. All that to say I knew Delusional would be great for a long time, I did not expect it to have so many surprises in store when it did finally drop.


Given that, up until this point, Dev’s music did play in the singles space it’s exciting to see what she can do on a more realized body of work and Delusional does feel like a holistic experience. The lead single to this EP, “Nightstand” for example, was a fine track on its own with its bedroom pop presentation and a huge vocal performance from Dev. Once you actually turn on the record however and see that the opening song “Cyperpunk Fairy” leads into that single you start to see this was never something that could be broken into pieces and consumed in bite sized chunks. In that same vein Dev Lemons is hurt on this project and frankly I didn’t think the woman who wrote “CEO of My Ass” would have it in her to hurt me this much. The pain in every vocal delivery, every lyric, is just hard to listen to.


Replace me with someone easier


Delusional also plays in a lot of diverse facets of indie and bedroom pop, which keeps every listen so fresh and exciting. On an EP a songwriter doesn’t need to present all these different flavors of the same concept but that’s a sign of her sheer ability to write and produce.


Finally on the closing track “Think About It” we see a woman at the end of her rope, putting us right in the heart of her own heartbreak. There’s a scream on this one, it's intense, it's gut wrenching, it's incredible. Dev Lemons often does keep that humorous persona online, even advertising this very EP as being about her being “so sad, boo hoo, whatever lady.” This EP is both a look into how incredible a musician she is and also a peek past the curtain of that very wall of laughter into the real heart of who she is. It’s an incredible debut and worth the wait.

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