Lee Emi
DESTROY EVERYTHING
OUT OCTOBER 2
CONTACT:
ROSIE BOYD // PUBLICIST
AVA KELLY // PUBLICIST
Sometimes you have to tear apart the stories that you’ve filled your life with before you can truly understand your deepest self. On DESTROY EVERYTHING (due October 2), singer-songwriter and member of indie quartet, The Crane Wives, Lee Emi bravely faces that challenge, dismantling assumptions about identity, kinship, and even her own physical body in search of something more enduring. Written across the compounded isolation of a global pandemic, a rare kidney disease diagnosis, and a lifelong search for belonging as a Korean adoptee raised in Michigan, the album finds Emilee Petersmark stripping identity down to its foundations. Even the moniker Lee Emi reflects that journey. “My original name was Lee Sang-Eun, but I was always afraid to use it,” she says. “For this project, we’re going to burn down what doesn’t serve us anymore and mix the Western and Eastern culture.” Darker and yet somehow perhaps shinier than her work with The Crane Wives, DESTROY EVERYTHING is less an act of demolition than reinvention—a collection of songs that confronts uncertainty head-on and discovers that self-definition is not a destination, but a lifelong act of creation.
Growing up just north of Detroit in the ‘90s, Emi very rarely had any contact with Korean culture, typically only when her family would occasionally drive nearly an hour to a small Korean restaurant. “There was a woman there who was a native Korean speaker who asked my name, and when I replied Lee Sang-Eun, she told me I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly,” Emi recalls. “I just couldn’t get it right and she kept correcting me. From that moment it felt scary to try and embrace that part of me.” True to the experience of many international adoptees, she often felt different from her classmates and friends, but also different from other Koreans. But as the years have passed and Emi has grown into herself as an artist (including five albums with The Crane Wives in 16 years), she has been increasingly interested in learning more about that part of herself.
A big turning point in that personal quest came in 2022, when she took her first trip to South Korea and visited the city where she was born. “It was very healing, life-changing, and a big part of that trip was trying to find local music and connect with that culture,” Emi explains. “As an adoptee you’re always told it’s going to be hard to return to your country of origin and be accepted, but I met musicians there and really connected with the scene.” While DESTROY EVERYTHING may not necessarily carry hallmarks of traditional Korean music, it does draw more metaphysical inspiration from that quest.
On lead single “Black Hole”, Emi growls her way through an existential attempt to find some hope in the face of the growing darkness, breaking through carved swathes of distorted guitar in search of the light. “Tomorrow is a new day, I won’t let you down/ I won’t let you down/ Is it too late for me to get right?/ I’d rather be a light, not a black hole,” she cries out as the smoky bass encircles. As the track builds, the narrator fights against the self-destructive tendencies of the world around her and looks to stand on her own against it—something that many listeners in the growing calamity of modernity would identify with.
That clinging to optimism comes in part from the fact that many of the songs date back to some of the most traumatic moments in Emi’s life. In 2019, as the Crane Wives were about to stop down from a heavy touring schedule and take a hiatus, all while Emi was still reframing her life after the crumbling of a years-long relationship. “I had this plan to be this person’s wife, move to California, maybe even quit my band, and all of a sudden I had to reevaluate what everything looked like,” she says. As if that uncertainty wasn’t enough, the whole world got a whole lot shakier thanks to the pandemic. And the cherry on top for Emi came via diagnosis of a rare kidney disease—one that necessitated frequent hospital visits and treatment with immunosuppressants, which is all to say an even more extreme form of necessary isolation. “Thankfully Ben [Zito, Crane Wives bassist and manager] reached out and offered to bring me into his studio and become a little pod of sorts,” Emi adds. “Through all the weird symptoms and hospital visits and transitions, he’s always been one of my biggest cheerleaders and a deep listener of music.”
Album highlight “Smoke in Empty Rooms” is a captivating whisper-fragile example of that depth, and a song tied to Emi’s feelings of the pandemic. The Michigander’s voice stretches across a skeletal backbone of acoustic guitar, with only layered harmonies and lung-rattling breath sifting into the mix at the climax. “I had lost an uncle to COVID and I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, and I wrote this song while dealing with being unable to be with my family in lockdown,” she recalls sadly. “I had to listen to my dad grieve over the phone. I was at home wondering if I would ever be able to engage with the world again.” The song’s lonely lyrics sink into the blood, Emi’s clarion voice wearing every ounce of heartsick pain.
Elsewhere, the rippling “Empty Spaces” plays out like a march through icy midwest winds, Emi singing through the fear of expressing one’s fullest self. “I identify as pansexual or bisexual, and growing up in a conservative Catholic community meant I didn’t have an opportunity to explore that,” she says. “As a queer adult playing music for a lot of queer kids, yeah, I feel this responsibility to embrace that identity, to be more open about it. I just wish I could protect all those kids in the audience at Crane Wives shows because I see this vulnerability that exists in them that I didn’t allow to exist in myself when I was that age.” In the song, that manifests in a sort of pained conversation with the inner voice that had once tried to convince her to not "let your heart be heard." The bonfire warmth of low-slung acoustic guitar and backmasked electric picking compete with a walloping wave of distorted noise that hits like a punch to the chest. “A big part of this project is being able to embrace the things that make me unique,” Emi says. “As a woman of color in the folk realm, I used to want to blend in and fit in those primarily white spaces, to downplay my sexuality, my heritage. But the most exciting thing about this project is embracing the things that make me me.”
Throughout DESTROY EVERYTHING, the singer-songwriter captures both the aching pain of life’s darkest moments but also the righteous, hopeful feeling that only the strongest can see peeking through. On the sultry, explosive title track, Emi harmonizes with a pitch-shifted shadow version of herself, laughing as the flames rise alongside her. Rather than let the pain of a broken relationship fester, she knows that sometimes you need to burn it all down. "The fire knows my language more than anyone, anyone/ And I've been talking to it in my sleep," she sighs, before raising to a beatific shout: “Destroy everything!”
For all its talk of fire, collapse, and unraveling, DESTROY EVERYTHING is ultimately an album about construction. “When things are unfair or unjust or when they feel like they can’t be fixed, I just want it to break,” Emi says, describing an impulse that has followed her since childhood. Across these songs, that urge becomes a tool for clearing space for something truer to grow, something powerful to reach through isolation, illness, grief, and uncertainty to connect with listeners in their own darkest moments. By tearing down what no longer serves her, Lee Emi hasn't simply discovered herself, she's built a foundation from which to keep becoming both for herself and for others. “I’m in remission from my kidney disease, and have done a lot of work in the past four years in terms of mental, emotional, and physical maintenance,” she says. “I finally feel like I have the experience and the confidence to just do the job well.”
PRESS RELEASES
7/14/2026: Lee Emi Announces Debut Album 'DESTROY EVERYTHING' Out 10/2 | Shares Single + Video "Clean Slate"