“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 Emmet 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.