Law Student By Day, Pop Star By Night: Meet ÊMIA

“I’m never where I wanna be,” Anh Lê, the artist known as ÊMIA, tells me with a smile as we sip matchas at a bohemian cafe in Greenpoint. “I’m always dreaming of other places.” It’s a sunny Friday morning, and she’s dressed in a trendy green sweater and denim dress combo, surprisingly bright-eyed for someone juggling a truly mind-boggling schedule.

Anh may not be headlining a stadium tour just yet, but get ready. The singer-songwriter-producer is building serious momentum with 32,000 monthly Spotify listeners, tracks at over 1.5 million streams, and TV placements on Netflix and Amazon Prime. And for good reason: She’s a damn good storyteller who’s mastered the art of pairing polished pop and electronic production with confessional, relatable lyrics.

Her new hyperpop earworm, “Gut Feeling,” has already had a viral moment on TikTok – Anh frequently squeezes TikTok promo into her study sessions, sharing short clips of herself dancing to her cinematic pop bangers in the New York Law School library. I discovered her music from one of those signature library TikToks and immediately saved it and checked out more of her discography.

Her artist name, ÊMIA, nods to her Vietnamese roots; the accent comes from her last name, and “em” is a she/her pronoun and also a term of endearment in Vietnamese. When brainstorming names back in 2016, she gravitated toward the trending short, all-caps monikers of the era, and thus, ÊMIA was born.

So, is the goal to drop out of law school and ~pop girl~ full-time? I ask. Anh pauses for a moment before answering, “I wanna do both. I love learning so much, and my choice to go to law school is very much an extension of my own experience.”

She’s referring to her experience with her brother, who has severe autism and is nonverbal. Their family has been through hell and back trying to advocate for him in a deeply fucked up healthcare system. “Every step of the way, I have always felt like our hands are tied behind our back,” she reflects. “With law school, I feel almost the same way that I feel with music: When I know I can master a skill, when I can understand the language of something, I can make things happen.”

If anyone can make things happen, it’s this queen. Between lengthy seminars and papers that would definitely break my brain, Anh miraculously carved out the time to write, produce, and promote a 17-track indie-pop album, Conversations We Were Supposed to Have.

When I note that women producers are still a rarity, Anh aptly points out that most female songwriters are already basically producing by having a clear vision for the instrumentation and vibe, and directing their studio sessions. Still, it took time for her confidence in that role to catch up.

The thesis of the new album, according to her Spotify page, is: “Art outlives the grief that once transformed us.” It’s inspired by back-to-back all-consuming New York romances that didn’t work out (A+ songwriting material). “I had just cut off ties with my first love, my first long-term relationship, and I was so bent on writing a full-length album… And then I fell in love with somebody else,” she recalls. Letting go, she admits, doesn’t come naturally. The urge to get the last word motivates her to create.

After going no contact with her second love for three years, she held onto an “almost spiritual” belief that they would find their way back to each other. Of course, when they did reunite, reality hit a bit different than the dream version. “When I had the opportunity to have the conversations that I always thought were gonna happen, I realized there are things that are irreversible,” she says. “I just needed a place to create every single thing that I thought was going to happen and put it into something that could live on forever.”

As of April 2026, she’s released three singles from the project: “Gut Feeling,” “The Plot,” and my personal favorite, “Corinne.” “Corinne,” following in the lineage of songs like “Heather” by Conan Gray and “Madeline” by Lily Allen, is a wistful pop tune from the perspective of the jealous onlooker, the one not chosen. Strangely enough, two men in Anh’s life have chosen a literal Corinne over her.

When she was 15, her best friend confessed feelings for her while still dating a girl named Corinne, and a decade later, history repeated itself with another man and another Corinne. “My brain just wanted to answer like, ‘Well, I was not chosen because the Corinnes are better than me in every way. It’s like there is something inherently deficient about who I am.’ ” It’s the kind of painful, irrational mental spiral every woman can relate to (unless you’re a figurative Corinne, I suppose). Her friends joke that the name fits the archetype perfectly because Corinne just sounds like an effortlessly cool French artist who reads classic literature.

Anh will continue to roll out the album track by track, and she also has plans to work on more visuals and music videos, incorporate more movement into her work, and test out the new music in a live setting… stay tuned for announcements.

In this moment, success is as simple as freedom and balance, Anh says. But in her wildest dreams, yes, she’d be Charli XCX-level famous one day. She even has an elaborate bit planned for her massive headline tour: “Have someone come up on stage and tell me a secret, and then I sign an NDA and it’s a legit thing cause I actually passed the bar.” Her Role Model “Sally” or Sabrina Carpenter “Juno” moment, if you will.

Fame doesn’t intimidate Anh one bit. She pictures herself slipping on chic shades and confidently striding past the paps like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.