It started with a heatwave in Athens.
The sun was high, the alleys empty, and Hemi Hemingway (aka Shaun Blackwell) was walking through the city with something heavy on his chest. “The heat on the stone at night, the dark and empty alleys, beautiful people moving everywhere and lots of exposed skin,” Hemingway recalls. “I was carrying a hidden sadness, and it knew.”
That trip in 2022, right before he packed up and left London for Aotearoa, stuck with him. He didn’t know what the future held. The move felt like freedom and heartbreak all at once. “In hindsight, there were signs that my life was really about to change,” he says. “I was moving back to New Zealand, and I didn’t know what my future looked like.”
About two and a half years later, that moment’s been carved into song: “(To Be) Without You”, Hemi Hemingway’s newest single, released via Stockholm-based label PNKSLM Recordings.
It’s a slow-burning synth ballad, full of post-punk gloom and romantic nostalgia, anchored by stabbing guitars and a saxophone outro that sounds like it wandered in from a smoky backroom bar.
It’s also his most vulnerable release yet, a love letter to a version of himself he can’t get back to, and a reckoning with the choices that led him here. “The song captures my worried mind,” he says. “That feeling of longing to have that place and time back again, to do things differently, but to have to instead make peace with my choices.”
The music video drives that home. Shot in Tāmaki Makaurau, it follows Hemingway as he’s trailed by a shadowy figure dressed in black — The Apparition. “I was on a run when the idea came,” he says. “I looked up at this stadium light in the park and it really reminded me of a Greek column. I realised I was seeing flashes of my old life amongst the landscape of my new life.”
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Played by actor Kelsey Magan, the figure is no monster. She’s grief. Regret. Memory. “It’s this personification of my unprocessed feelings around my separation and leaving London,” he says. “Only through that confrontation do I come out better off.”
He’s not rushing what comes next. A second album is on the way, slowly. The vibe’s still the same — heartfelt, dreamy, cinematic. And the ghosts? He’s learning to live with them.
Hemi Hemingway’s “(To Be) Without You” is out now via PNKSLM Recordings.
