When Apricot Magazine spoke with Emily Mulenga ahead of her debut, she described a world where feeling and fun weren’t opposites but dance partners. That vision lands with shimmering clarity on I Saw This And Thought Of You (released July 25, 2025), a five-track, self-produced EP that folds electro pop, bubblegum dance, house, and hyperpop into a lush, synth-laden postcard from the heart. It’s an invitation to dance through your memories—part euphoria, part ache—crafted alone in a London bedroom by a classically trained pianist and flautist who also happens to be a visual artist. The result is as tactile as it is emotional: sugar-rush hooks, glossy pads, giddy percussion, and melodies that glow with sentimentality, intimacy, and nostalgia.
Mulenga’s training shows up not as virtuoso grandstanding but as compositional poise. Her songs breathe, pivot, and resolve with a confidence that speaks to years of listening and learning before hitting “record.” She’s building kinetic pop structures with an arranger’s ear—layering voices, stacking chords that feel inevitable, and setting percussive patterns that are simple enough to remember yet smart enough to surprise. The EP’s palette is unabashedly bright, but underneath the confetti are carefully drawn shadows: the yearning that makes a chorus hit harder, the wink of humor that keeps longing from curdling into gloom. This is dance music that knows the difference between escape and release—and chooses both.
“Dum Da Di Day” opens like a sunbeam through blinds, the title’s syllables bouncing in time with a bubblegum pulse that’s equal parts cheeky and precise. It’s a sugar-glossed overture that plants Mulenga’s flag firmly in the territory of joy—not naïveté, but joy as an active stance. You can hear the bedroom in the production (the closeness, the hand-made sparkle), but you can also hear the imaginary club in her head: a generous stereo field, synths swelling like paper lanterns, a rhythm section that taps your shoulder until you say yes. Even the smallest elements feel placed with intention, as if each clap and chirp is a brushstroke in a bright digital collage.
“Here 4 A Good Time” shifts the EP into house-leaning territory—elastic bass, four-on-the-floor persistence, and a vocal that rides the groove with a conspiratorial grin. It’s Mulenga at her most kinetic, a weekend anthem shaped by weekday wisdom. The hook is pure stick-in-your-head pop, but the verses carry a soft aftertaste of perspective; the song is less about reckless abandon and more about choosing joy in real time. The emotional calculus is classic Mulenga: keep the BPM up, keep the guard down, and let the melody say the heavy things so the words don’t have to.
Of the two previously released singles, “Oliver” is the EP’s most diaristic turn, a pointed love-letter-slash-voicemail delivered over translucent synth pads and pulse-lit drums. Naming a track after a person is always a bet on specificity, and Mulenga wins it by leaning into tenderness without losing tempo. There’s humor in her phrasing—little lilted edges, a playful emphasis here and there—but the emotional throughline is direct: attention is intimacy, and intimacy is risk. The production keeps her voice forward but not isolated; it’s cradled by harmonies that float like neon fog. If you’ve ever danced your feelings into clarity, “Oliver” feels like the moment the lights dim just enough for truth to step forward.
“Walk Like A Woman” clicks into a swaggering strut, part runway, part mirror pep-talk. The track reads like a study of embodiment—how we rehearse confidence, how performance becomes permission. Mulenga’s arrangement nods to late-’90s pop and early-’00s club textures, then gleefully smears them with a hyperpop gloss: a buoyant kick, rubbery synth leads, and a chorus that resolves with satisfying symmetry. It’s catchy, but more than that, it’s catalytic—the kind of song that changes your posture as it plays, shoulders loosened, chin lifted, pace quickened to match the beat.
“Call Out My Name,” the closing single, is the EP’s most overtly sentimental moment, and it earns every swell. The title references a universal plea—see me, choose me, say it out loud—and Mulenga sings into that open space with a steady, unafraid tone. The arrangement blooms in stages: first the hush, then the heartbeat, then the bloom of stacked vocals that sound like someone finally deciding to take up room. It’s not melodrama; it’s clarity. Where earlier tracks flirt with irony, this one lets sincerity win, building to a chorus that feels like the emotional thesis of the record: you can dance toward longing and still arrive at yourself.
Taken together, the five songs function like a miniature coming-of-heart arc. The sequencing is subtle but effective—spark, sprint, letter, strut, confession—moving from flirtatious brightness to grounded openness. Mulenga threads the EP with small motives (a clipped clap here, a frosted arpeggio there) that resurface like familiar streets on the walk home, lending continuity without redundancy. Her sound design loves the glossy and the tactile: plastic-gleam leads against velvet pads, fizzy tops softened by warm, humane low end. And her voice—ever at the center—wears the production like a favorite jacket, fitted but relaxed.
What’s most striking is how the project internalizes its influences without parroting them. Electro pop lends the EP its sleek surfaces; bubblegum dance gives it that giddy kick; house provides the spine; hyperpop supplies the mischievous edge. But Mulenga compresses those inputs into something identifiably hers: a pop grammar fluent in humor and heartache, confident enough to be cute, serious enough to be soft. You can feel the visual artist in the choices—the chiaroscuro of tone, the way she treats silence like negative space, the color-sense in her synth voicings. It’s synesthetic pop, not because it’s flashy, but because it understands how sound suggests image and memory at once.
As a debut, I Saw This And Thought Of You lands with the calm authority of an artist arriving fully herself. That’s the quiet miracle of these five tracks: they’re DIY to the core, yet nothing feels tentative. The bedroom origin is a feature, not a footnote; you hear intimacy in the mic proximity, the handmade loops, the delight of hearing an idea lock into place at 2 a.m. But you also hear ambition—arrangements that know their way around a chorus, bridges that open windows, endings that feel earned. It’s the sound of a project that has been “longing to be released into the world,” finally stepping outside and discovering that daylight suits it.
If the EP is a message, it’s written in bold, bright script: feeling is fashionable, craft is cool, and pop can be both a diary and a dance floor. Emily Mulenga’s debut doesn’t pick between sincerity and spectacle; it slides the dimmer until both feel true. And after spending 18 minutes in her world, you’re left with the best kind of afterglow—the urge to press play again, text a friend the title, and add one more song to the list of things that made today softer, brighter, and more alive.
