In 2023, phem told interviewers she was making her first album. She described a rollout plan for the following year. That year came and went, and what arrived instead was a five-song EP called pheelings pt. 1, released December 30, 2024, through Hopeless Records. As of this writing, the full-length remains a promise, not a product, even as phem's name keeps showing up, again and again, in songwriting credits that belong to other people.
The Car in Crenshaw
Before any of it, phem was a drummer, keeping time from the back of the stage rather than standing in front of it. A producer friend pulled her into the studio to try writing instead, and for roughly a year she lived between her car and a studio space in Los Angeles's Crenshaw District, a stretch she has since described as formative to both her creativity and her sense of her own sexuality. Her first credit under the name came almost by accident: scratch vocals she laid down on G-Eazy's 2017 single "Just Friends" were good enough that the guide take stayed in the final mix.
She has explained the name itself more than once. "Cool and cute," she told Kerrang! in December 2021, reflecting that she had "always been the 'fem' in relationships with women," and also, she admitted, because it sounds "weird and gross like 'phlegm.'" Elsewhere she has tied it to the word "ephemeral," which, given how her career has actually unfolded, might be the more accurate read.
It's cool and cute, and I've always been the 'fem' in relationships with women. Also it's kind of weird and gross like 'phlegm.'phem, Kerrang!
The Ledger
What followed her 2019 debut EP VACUMHEAD, built around "Grim Reaper" and "Sweater," was a parallel career most casual listeners never clocked. Working out of producer John Feldmann's pop-punk-revival camp, phem became one of the scene's most reliable outside writers, credited on Machine Gun Kelly's "5:3666" and "Sorry Mama," on Jaden Hossler's hit "So What" under his jxdn name, and on tracks for Iann Dior, American Teeth, The Hunna, grandson and The Used. Spotify for Artists lists her as a credited songwriter on roughly sixty-two tracks as of an August 2025 snapshot, a number that keeps climbing while her own catalog moves in fits and starts.
She keeps finishing everyone else's records.
The Album That Isn't
The Feldmann orbit also produced phem's most personal credit outside her own name: Tyler Posey's 2021 single "Shut Up," co-written with Feldmann and featuring Travis Barker on drums. Posey has said that once he brought the song's bones "to John Feldmann and phem" and got Barker behind the kit, it felt like "literally a dream come true." phem and Posey met through that session, dated for two years, and married on October 14, 2023, at a private meditation garden in Pacific Palisades.
Her live résumé grew alongside the writing: a full European support run on Avril Lavigne's Love Sux Tour in 2023, a Reading & Leeds slot in 2022 timed to her Hopeless signing, and two nights at The Roxy in West Hollywood that bookended the same Los Angeles scene. During a COVID-era livestream she headlined a bill with Christian Gates and Royal & the Serpent opening; on February 26, 2022, the arrangement flipped, and phem was second opener at a Gates headline show, going on before Landon Barker's first-ever live set.
By 2025, phem's own rollout had a new wrinkle: "im blue" arrived alongside a companion "im blue (phemcore version)," the clearest sign yet that she and her team are trying to brand her sound as its own micro-genre, distinct from the broader pop-punk revival she's grouped with. "Healing Factor," a collaboration with Rich Delinquent, followed on November 21, 2025. Both are singles. Neither is the album.
Critics have never struggled to describe what phem does. AllMusic calls her a "dark and vulnerable singer/producer" with a "fluid exploration of genres and moods," and The Forty-Five has praised songwriting built to make listeners "at least a little bit uncomfortable." What nobody has been able to describe yet is the record she's spent three years saying she's making. She keeps finishing everyone else's. Her own remains, fittingly for a name she once tied to the word ephemeral, the one that hasn't quite arrived.