Emma Dilemma is nothing if not a chamelon. Refusing to be bound by genre, Emma has recorded and released rock, pop punk, and disco-tinged tracks, with her latest single Neighbourhood including rap verses contributed by artists Dende the Sensei, Masia One, and Jay Coast. The end result is a true international collaboration, with the artists spread out across New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, reflecting on life in their corners of the world and exploring the ideas of local community and identity.
The track wasn’t always intended to be a collaboration, however. “I actually have a first demo of it, where I’m rapping two verses, and it’s incredibly cringeworthy. I’m much better at rapping now, but at the time, I was like ‘I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off’, it sounds way too cheesy, but I knew it was a f*cking good hook, the chorus and the whole energy of it.” Working with her mentor, Scott MacLachlan, Emma felt that while the track was great, there was something not quite right with it, and after some discussion, the idea was born to open up the track to include other artists. “What if it’s about where everyone lives, and we find some other rappers to take verses about where they’re from?” MacLachlan loved the idea, and the search began for the right artists for the collab.
The first guest rapper was an easy one. A friend of Emma’s, Dende the Sensei, part of Auckland-based rap duo No Comply, had already been working with MacLachlan. American artist Jay Coast was someone Emma met through a mutual connection, and after following his Instagram page and listening to his music, the two started chatting, with Jay officially joining the project in late 2023.
The final artist took longer to find. “I knew I wanted three verses, and I had to try and cover as much global difference as possible. Me and Scott were talking in one of our planning sessions, and I said I don’t know who the third person could be, but I know that it should be a woman, and hopefully an Asian woman.” A week later, after reaching out to his networks, MacLachlan came back with a few options. After listening to Masia, Emma knew immediately that she was the right choice. The two connected, and the verse was turned around in about a week.
From first writing the song in 2021, to finally being mixed in 2024, it was a long process to finally having the song recorded and mixed. For Emma, there was just something about that hook which kept bringing her back to it. “I’d listen to it once and it would immediately be stuck in my head. Around the time I was writing it and formulating the initial demo, I was still doing my weekly live stream shows which started during COVID lockdowns. I guess it’s 2021, we might’ve still been in lockdown. It was during a time where you were allowed to visit your friends. I remember playing it to our friend Alex Harmer, who’s a brilliant sound engineer, and a couple of guest audience members that we had through a UE boom at the end of a stream session one night, and everyone started singing along to it right away, while we were still listening to it for the first time. I was like, okay, this is how I know that the song’s got legs, because people remember it right away as something that made them feel really good, and fun to sing along together and celebrating where you’re from. The song is celebrating where you’re from despite its flaws, and kind of being able to poke fun at yourself, and yeah, it’s a joyous thing.”
The music video was perhaps one of the most challenging aspects, as Emma knew she had to be in each of the rapper’s home towns, in person, with them. “I chose to do this song on hard mode,” she recalls. Travelling to Singapore and the US, the video was shot across multiple continents, which presented several challenges. “I think the biggest challenge was establishing my dominance over the project. Originally, I wanted one person to just film it all with me and travel with me, but we had a falling out and so that wasn’t able to happen. And so then I knew that, okay, I’m going to have to have different videographers for each location, and that’s why I really had to communicate as effectively as I could that I just needed someone to film me and my friend performing and having fun, and then just give me all the footage. I don’t want you to edit anything, I’m sorry. ”
The final result was a music video ultimately directed and edited by Emma herself. “It felt cohesive because it was coming from me finding what I think were the most joyous moments and all aspects of those sessions together.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing throughout the process, however. Around the time Emma was in the US preparing to film with Jay, she had a falling out with one of her videographers, ultimately resulting in the shoot being cancelled for the time being. After a couple of attempts to make it work, things in both Emma’s personal and professional lives just took over, and she made the call to come home. “I felt like a failure at that point. I couldn’t see how I could ever finish it, and I felt like I was taking too long so it’s not even going to be relevant anymore. it’s not going to be relevant to myself.”
At the end of 2024, Emma found herself in a deep depression, and spent much of 2025 struggling to break free. “Kind of towards the end of being able to actually come out of the really dark pits of despair, I felt a glimmer of hope and excitement again, and I booked myself a two-week trip to America in August of 2025, last year. I made it my mission to go to St Louis and finish the video with Jay, and Jay was thankfully still keen to pick it up. ”
The song was finally finished, after almost five years, in January 2026, but strangely enough, it wasn’t released right away. “I kind of just sat on it for ages, it felt too immense. I’ve put so much time and effort into this project, completely non-funded, like all my own money. I don’t know why I didn’t get funding for it, probably because it has non-New Zealand artists in it, but I’m trying to take New Zealand to the world. I’m just doing it all by myself.”
A few months later, Emma found the motivation to release the song, in the midst of a highly creative phase. “I got diagnosed with bipolar about 2 months ago. It was during a massive manic, joyful phase of my obvious mental illness that I needed to release Neighbourhood. It was like I was getting these spiritual downloads. I was writing heaps of songs, I was doing heaps of amazing stuff, and then immediately I knew that Neighbourhood had to be planned to come out during this time while I was on like a creative high, which was actually a manic episode. I call them creative highs because now I identify them as such in my life.”
“Finding out that I’m bipolar has been a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, and it was like, thank you. This explains so much about my life, and I honestly feel like it’s be being diagnosed as being an artist, like you know, it’s that whole ‘the tortured artist’, and then you have the manic artist. It’s the duality of an artist’s life and I can accept it now, and catch it when the dark starts creeping in, thankfully. I’ve learned how to harness my power.”
Describing herself on her website as ‘The Patron Saint of Self Sabotage’ is something which Emma has been thinking about a lot recently. “I’ve been grappling and thinking about that a lot lately, especially because my name is Emma Dilemma, like I’m always prophesying myself to always be in a fricking pickle. But, I think that it’s beautifully accurate and representative of my bipolar, I’m always going to be in a little bit of a dilemma, and I’m always going to be self-sabotaging, because, you know, when my shadow creeps up, when the dark side creeps up, I do start trying to control or destroy things. But now, I’m more aware of that, so hopefully I can stop it before she gets too carried away. I still think that I’m always going to be the patron saint of self sabotage, but I’m trying to spread an emotional message that you can control your emotions and drive your own happiness, you know?”
With the timing now feeling right to finally release Neighbourhood into the world it celebrates, Emma referenced astrology to help pick the best date for the track. “It ended up coming down to June 19th, and I was like ‘f*ck, isn’t that two weeks from now’, and I just committed and did it. It’d been this big scary thing, and then I just had really, you know, beelined precision inspiration of like ‘I have to release it now, like it feels right now,’ so I did. That’s my story.”
A highly ambitious track that is finally released into the wild, Emma now looks back on this time and the connections that she’s made. “I didn’t know how hard Neighbourhood was going to be to make, and during it, I questioned my choices a lot. But on this side of it, I’m like ‘f*ck, that’s cool that I did that’, and I still love the song. I listen to it probably once a day. It’s on my favourites playlist, it just comes up on shuffle and I’m like ‘I do love my neighbourhood and I love these artists that I’ve met.’ I’ve forged friendships for live and I just love talking about it and spreading the joy that it’s meant to spread.”
Check out the video for Neighbourhood below!
