But she hums along, staying cool and coiled, teaching herself how to reset. “I guess it must be everybody’s birthday all the time.” There’s a sense of fear trembling somewhere under the catchy beat, a sadness Vu could excavate. “Everybody’s crying in the hallway,” Vu moans. The closest she comes to addressing it head-on is “Everybody’s Birthday,” a hazy song from the Lana and Lorde school of generational malaise. “Oh honey, I promise I’m the world’s worst lover,” Vu wails on “World’s Worst,” before murmuring, “I wonder if I get any younger than this.” It’s a winking, ironic articulation of the early-adult pain that she spends most of the record circling and dressing up in metaphor. “Here are my bruises, all my dents and my fuses,” she sings on the title track, before walking back any suggestion of vulnerability: “But I don’t really care now.”Ĭritics have compared Vu to Lana Del Rey practically since the start of her career, and there are snippets of Public Storage that recall the dark glamour and seeping melodrama of Born to Die. ![]() Instead she keeps a calculated distance, opting for intricacy over intimacy. The record doesn’t convey that personal tie, though, and while Vu makes many pretty statements about God and good and evil, she offers little about herself. Vu named the album after the massive self-storage building she lived beside when she started writing it, a structure that reminded her of the storage units she used while moving around a lot as a kid. At times, the sound is striking-the lush strings on “Maker,” the spatter of keys in “Anything Striking,” the weird wriggles of synths that creep into her choruses. Vu co-produced the album, which oscillates between bright coils of pop (“Keeper,” “Aubade”) and blasts of drums and guitar. “I live in a hole in the wall/You live in a hole in my head,” she sighs on “My House.” “They’ll blow smoke straight through your face,” she lilts on “Heaven, “And you turn to dust/And you fly away.” Where Vu’s previous releases were vivid and tactile, Public Storage numbs out. Vu sings about heaven burning, about pleading with the sun, about dreaming in gold. These are opaque songs about armageddon, gesturing at morose feelings and crammed with abstract statements. 2021 LP Public Storage marks her first release with Ghostly and her first time working with a co-producer, Jackson Phillips (Day Wave).On Public Storage, Vu’s official debut and her first release for Ghostly, that emotional core diffuses. Early coverage came from Pitchfork, NME, and The Fader, the latter playfully declaring, “the seventeen-year-old is cooler than you and me.” She followed it up with a double EP in 2019 on Luminelle titled Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway.Īs a live performer, Vu has supported the likes of Soccer Mommy, Sales, Nilufer Yanya, Wet, Kilo Kish, and Phantogram. Bear, who released Vu’s self-produced debut EP, How Many Times Have You Driven By, on their Luminelle Recordings imprint. Her 2018 single “Crying on the Subway” caught the ear of Gorilla vs. ![]() Her sound - brooding, melodic pop driven by guitar and Vu’s distinctive contralto - developed across a series of self-releases, including a low-key Willow Smith collaboration and covers of The Cure and Phil Collins. In 2014, at age 14, she started keeping a journal of bedroom pop experiments on Bandcamp. ![]() But what I was listening to at that time was very different from what I performed.” She remembers, “A lot of my peer musicians were surf rock/punk type bands and so I tried to fit into that when I was gigging around. She’d wake up every day and listen to LA’s ALT 98.7, home to ’90s and ’00s alternative rock later in high school, she found the local DIY scene. Vu’s relationship with music began when she picked up a guitar her dad had lying around and taught herself to play. She signed to Ghostly International in 2021, leading to the announcement of her full-length debut, Public Storage. Hana Vu writes pop songs from her bedroom in Los Angeles.
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