“I used to watch a lot of Planet Earth,” Emma DeLaRosa says thoughtfully. The young artist—who has given herself the name The Diver—used to watch the Ice Worlds season “over and over again,” so much so that the docuseries became an unlikely muse for her debut album. “My roommate Tim could attest to this. It was all he would hear about.”

DeLaRosa and I had hopped on a Zoom, speaking from a little over 900 miles apart, to discuss her album, Deep Diver. With rippling synth and currents of distortion, layered over siren-like vocals that slip from whispers to whimpers, there isn’t a box bent out of shape enough to categorize DeLaRosa’s music. It makes sense, then, that her reference point isn’t another musician, but the polar ice caps—an influence that feels as disorienting as it does fitting.

“It felt very icy to me,” she says about the album. “Capturing iciness was something that I thought about a lot, and just like, in-between spaces? The Arctic or Antarctic—they’re such in-between spaces.”

Despite its unintelligible lyrics, the songs on Deep Diver are a manifestation of DeLaRosa’s interiority, portraying emotions complex enough to be as uncategorizable as the album itself, rather than isolated moments from her life. As she began writing and producing the album, she allowed the songs to “form their own structure,” resisting traditional songwriting in favor of something more intuitive, and using her non-musical inspirations—which range from David Attenborough to Fyodor Dostoyevsky—to capture a chilly, liminal mood.

Like her songwriting, DeLaRosa’s evolution as an artist has been both unpredictable and organic. Raised in Connecticut, her musical journey began early in her childhood with classical piano lessons—a strict discipline that sits in stark contrast to the uninhibited electronic world she now inhabits—before teaching herself guitar. On Deep Diver, both instruments are buried beneath heavy processing, nearly unrecognizable, alongside an even more unlikely companion: the accordion.

The first time I saw DeLaRosa, it was through an Instagram reel of her squeezing and pulling at an accordion’s bellows and tapping purposefully at its keys. It looked overwhelmingly powerful and large, and the hues of yellow and beige that coated its exterior told the story of a once ivory sheen worn away with age. The videos received more engagement than almost all other content on her page, with comments raving about her command over the intimidating instrument.

“It's my grandfather's accordion,” she tells me when I ask her about the video. “He was like, ‘It has keys on it. You play things that have keys.’ And I was like, ‘This is fucking awesome.’ It sounds crazy, just like this big, roaring beast.”

DeLaRosa’s family roots trace back to Ecuador, where the accordion is central to traditional folk music. Its presence on Deep Diver, though tucked underneath layers of synth, feels less like a stylistic choice than an inheritance she subliminally folds into the album’s liminal, in-between soundscape.

While Deep Diver draws heavily from DeLaRosa’s inward, self-directed beginnings, it is also the product of collaboration—of other voices, structures and ways of creating, which she found while studying at Boston University. There, she entered the Boston rock scene in the most Gen-Z way possible: over a pandemic-ordained Zoom class.

“[My classmate] had a band I joined called Corporeal, and then through that, we just met a bunch of people,” DeLaRosa says. “Then Corporeal had a show, and this other guy came, and we ended up forming another band with him called Video Days.”

From there, the web only expanded. DeLaRosa went on to play in two more bands, Gym Rat and Joby, performing across Boston’s underground circuit—an uncountable number of shows at Allston’s O’Brien’s, along with a steady rotation of dingy basement gigs.

Those local projects eventually brought her and her Gym Rat bandmates to New York City, where they crammed into a single room to eat, sleep, record and perform over the course of a weekend. “That was, like, the best and worst weekend ever,” she recalls, her voice tinged with amusement. “It was just so gross, and I was so tired.”

Over three days, Gym Rat recorded an album by day and played shows by night alongside other New York bands. DeLaRosa opened the weekend with a solo set in which she appears in a nearly pitch-black room, her airy vocals echoing over the kind of hypnotic synth on Deep Diver. The image is unlike the energetic, frantic music that plays in typical indie rock venues, and yet, it’s just as intoxicating.

“I don't think this solo record could have existed without all the bands that I've been in,” DeLaRosa says. “They’ve shaped how I view music, how I write and taught me so much about recording.”

And yet, Deep Diver is entirely her own—written and recorded in solitude. When it was finished, that independence gave way to a different kind of vulnerability: a hope that listeners would understand it, or at the very least, feel something close to what she did while making it.

“For years, I just played music with my bestest friends,” DeLaRosa says. “But it was so different having something that's totally my own. Hoping that it would live up to what I wanted it to be was really scary.”

But understanding, like diving, requires a certain surrender. Deep Diver doesn’t guide its listener so much as submerge them into something cold and difficult to map. But for DeLaRosa, that may be the point.

The Diver Submerses Herself in the Liminal