Semmi Wants His Music to Heal You

“If my pain can heal someone then I feel like I’m doing a good job. That’s really all I want for music,” Semmi says in his first interview.

Two years ago, a friend brought a mic on a Palm Springs trip and asked Semmi to try making music with him.

“I’m the type of person to avoid something that’s scary,” he told me one night from a dimly lit bedroom in LA. “I’ve done piano classes for a couple of months. I’ve played guitar and violin, but I’d never been on the mic.”

Semmi was nervous, but he gave it a try. What did he have to lose? At that point, life was pretty shitty and he had always felt like he would be a singer, even if he had no confidence in his voice. 

But then something unexpected happened. Semmi played back the song he recorded, and heard himself for the first time. “After I heard my voice, I thought, ‘I think I can make hits off what I’ve been doing.’” 

After that, Semmi was “locked in. I got addicted to it. I did whatever it took to make music. I didn’t even have headphones. I just started off with my Macbook speakers and a mic,” he said. Eventually he upgraded to high quality headphones and a nice mic that he proudly calls “my baby”. 

Two years later, the 24 year-old Los Angeles native is preparing to release his debut single “RIP”. The song is dark, he tells me, even if the melody is unexpectedly bright. “But the lyrics are literally like, ‘I’m trying to unalive myself because I’m going through this situation,’” he says with a tinge of dry humor. The song is about a relationship that’s crumbled, but Semmi only used that as a metaphor. 

“The deeper subject is when you’re actually fucked,” he explained. “When you think, ‘My life is terrible right now and I’d rather die.’” 

Despite the dark subject matter, “RIP” is actually a banger. It’s nihilistic pop music, to be sure, but it folds into the same vein of the messy, raw music of Post Malone’s best work or Kid LAROI. But this kind of vulnerability is natural for Semmi, who wants his music to speak to people who might feel lonely or depressed.

“My music has so many raw emotions,” he said, explaining that sometimes looking back at previous songs can feel “cringy”. But “I feel like I’ve grown as a person writing this darker music.”  

Semmi, the musician, is essentially an alter ego for Sam Lee, the kid who spent most of his adolescence as a loner and who is only recently growing confident in the person he wants to be. “But it’s the way I cope and I’d rather not affect other people when I’m going through these things,” he said. “So my mic is the only listener to these problems.” 

Semmi’s music charts a singer’s journey to understanding his past trauma and finally embracing all of the broken pieces of who he is.

Semmi spent a lot of time alone growing up. 

His parents immigrated from Korea to Los Angeles in the 1980s, and met after the end of their first marriages. They married with children from previous relationships, but Semmi was an only child at home. The Lees worked long hours as they tried to find even footing in America, which meant Semmi often had to fend for himself. “I taught myself how to grow up,” he surmised. 

This is a reality experienced by many first generation Americans: The burden to survive, to learn how to adapt to new situations with emotional intelligence or to be the translator for stressed, overwhelmed parents is something Semmi and many first generation Asian Americans live through. 

The ramifications were felt in how he became a loner. “I was really scared and shy as a kid,” he told me quietly. “I say I’m not an interesting person because I feel like I spent most of my childhood playing games or just in my own thoughts.” 

For a while, though, things seemed good. The Lees bought a home, a major accomplishment for many immigrants, and Semmi had what he remembered as a happy childhood. During those years, he would listen to BIGBANG and fantasize about being an idol. K-Pop felt fresh and exciting to him, and BIGBANG were badass idols who he could see himself in. Even if he was alone, Semmi felt a gentle comfort in the isolation. “I actually prefer it,” he told me, something that I, too, can relate with.

But in 2008, one year after the country went into a major recession, the Lee’s lost their home, and stability was swapped with uncertainty as they moved to different apartments. A childhood of displacement meant that nowhere truly felt like home to Semmi. Even though he’s never left Los Angeles, the city at times still feels foreign to him, as if there was nowhere he could truly place roots in.

“That's kinda how I got my personality because I’d never stay in one place long and I had no friends at all. It’s like, I feel like I’m always floating,” he said. “I feel like I belong, but I really don’t. That’s where a lot of my issues stem from because I think, ‘Do I even belong?’” 

Semmi tried his best to figure it out. He attended college at UC Santa Barbara where he wondered what he would do with his life. He got into a long term relationship and learned about love. But his world shifted again when he was 19, and his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

“That is when my personality switched,” he said. “I used to be this happy going guy but now I feel like I’m a lot more mindful of my emotions.” 

Problems deepend for Semmi and his mother. There was financial uncertainty. Without Semmi’s father there wouldn’t be a second stream of income, and what the hell was Semmi going to do with his life, anyway? It was hard to trust people. While he cared for his dying father, his first relationship ended, and then he learned the meaning of “fake friends”. Those two events were, perhaps, correlated.

“I used drugs as a coping mechanism,” he told me, adding that it’s not something he’s proud of – but what else could he do? He kept his hopes up as best he could while searching to belong, at point even finding love again for three years. But the pull to be a musician was stronger.

“Juice Wrld was a huge influence on me back then,” Semmi said about the rapper who made music about mental health. Today, Semmi admires Juice World for his unflinching honesty about his struggles with addiction. “He has a special place in my heart for that.” Looking back on it, the fact that Semmi survived is an accomplishment in itself. 

“I was 19 so I was still very much a kid, and we didn’t really have direction in life,” he said. “It was very scary.” When he looks back on it now, he remembers My Chemical Romance’s pivotal album “The Black Parade” as a body of work that helped him process the trauma of losing his father. 

“It really helped me understand who I am as a person and that it’s okay to relate to these things. What MCR says in their lyrics really pertains to me today more than ever. Their album talks about death. Someone is dying from cancer and their stages are told through stories,” he said. “It helped me grieve over the fact that this important person in my life isn’t here anymore, so it’s okay to feel the way I’m feeling.” 

“There is no other option,” Semmi says. “This is the only thing I’m good at. This is life or death for me.”

Semmi was still lost last year when he met Justin Trash, a singer from CLUB BOYBND who’s experiencing a viral hit with their song “kiss me thru the phone”. The two are like fire and ice: Justin is sharp and quick-witted, while Semmi is quieter and takes his time to speak his mind, like he’s rolling around several thoughts in his brain before selecting one. But they share more in common than you might first expect. They both are first generation Korean Americans who have dealt with similar traumas, and they’re both trying to navigate an industry where gatekeepers no longer are relevant. 

“He’s like a big bro to me,” Semmi said. “I feel like I’m under Justin’s guidance and I’ve learned so much about my own personality from him. Being comfortable in my own skin is the most important thing I’ve learned.” When I first met Justin he called Semmi one of his “orphans”, a younger artist who he could mentor and guide through the business. 

Justin’s coaching Semmi on how to start a career in music. He’s Semmi’s hype man who reshares his videos on social media and who encourages him to dig deep for songwriting. “You need to make a video a day,” he tells Semmi, which he’s done, filming several short clips for “RIP” dressed in a black hoodie in his apartment. 

Earlier this year, Justin brought Semmi along to open for two rising K-R&B singers, JUNNY and GEMINI. Semmi had never performed in front of a crowd when Justin asked him to join CLUB BOYBND’s set, but he was ready to push himself. “It was definitely a scary experience at first but it’s something that I can’t stop thinking about,” he said. He likens the feeling of being onstage to blacking out because almost all he can remember is the bright lights of fans’ cell phones in his face. 

After the shows, fans sent Semmi videos and he would study them, figuring out what he could improve on and how he could possess a bigger stage presence. But mostly he felt confident that this is where he belongs. “Man,” he said, “ I can’t wait to hit the stage again.”

Their friendship has grown since the shows. Justin has been there to encourage Semmi to not overthink things; to make the damn music, to post a video, and stop worrying about what comes next. “I’m a person that obsesses over one thing if it comes to mind. Justin was the person who told me to not spiral. He tells me that all the time, ‘Don’t spiral’,” he said. “Don’t get too locked into the problem that you can’t solve because it’s only going to get worse.”

“Justin was the first person to say that I’m a normal person and that I belong here,” he said. “That’s what drove me to keep writing these songs.” Justin taught Semmi to embrace his Korean heritage and to be proud of his history as a first generation Asian American. But he’s also told him to not be afraid to be vulnerable; that these pieces of himself that feel sharp and painful can actually heal others. That’s been life-changing for Semmi. 

When he looks back on “The Black Parade”, an album that helped him through an isolated childhood, Semmi hopes that his music can offer the same comfort. Music is a way for Semmi to cope; to express his fears and trauma, but it’s also a way for him to connect with you, the listener, who might also be going through some real shit.

Plus as Semmi puts it, “There is no other option. Music is the only thing I’m good at. This is life or death for me.” 

So he’s continuing to mine his pain into catharsis, bravely exposing a lifetime of scars in hopes that listeners might hear their own trauma in his music. 

“If I can heal one person then I feel like I should continue doing music,” he told me as he thought about his purpose. “If my pain can heal someone then I feel like I’m doing a good job. That’s really all I want for music.”