Still, How Many Times is an intriguing glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a skillfully carved path-even if it leaves you wondering what it was that made her cry in public in the first place, what makes her tears dry. Los Angeles-based artist Hana Vu drops her latest EP, Parking Lot (out via Ghostly), a slow spinning, haunting collection of six tracks slated to chill you straight to the bone. When the rapper Satchy adds a sleek verse to “Cool,” their voices sound complementary, but it’s a bit of a disruption. But in terms of lyrics and melodies, nothing else on the EP resonates quite as strongly as “Crying on the Subway,” and often the smoothed edges threaten to turn these songs into chilled-out indie muzak. On the whole, Vu’s knowingly detached vision feels cohesive, and her productions shine. The focus of How Many Times attests to it. “Gonna make it perfect/Better than it has been.” When Vu proclaims, wisely, “I’m tryna make it cool/.Don’t tell me that I’m wrong/’Cos ain’t nobody right,” it feels like her personal aesthetic thesis. “Cool” is Vu’s understated loner anthem about hiding out and staying home to work on yourself: “It’s OK to be alone/’Cos I’m gonna make it happen,” she sings. “426” has a melancholic, retro shuffle with shades of Lana Del Rey cool. The entire song conveys loneliness and comfort at once.Īcross the minor keys and twinkling chords of How Many Times, Vu sings about mundanity, failure, disappointment, and fear. “Take the red line into downtown/I’m trying to escape you.” Her richly layered vocals feel like a long sigh, like infatuation steadily deflating, like a cold stare. “In my dreams I’m in that gray room/In my chest I’m feeling dark blue,” Vu sings, evoking the colors of her mood music. It is a muted daydream with a wobbly bass sway, the sound of quiet longing and a resigned single tear, of a person who really is trying to just get by. Instead, “Crying on the Subway” is emotionally vacant in a way that feels real. The song doesn’t convey the claustrophobia so typical of city music, like Chandra’s “ Subways,” nor does it contain the gut-wrenching despair of girl-group weepers. Her elliptical sensibility makes “Crying on the Subway” more subtle and restrained than you’d expect. How Many Times spans such styles as loungey downbeat pop and yearning indie rock balladry, but it is all tied together by a charmingly droll vibe and Vu’s deep, soulful voice. Vu’s primary mode is electronic dream pop with streaks of misery that feel discernibly teenage: “I’m always on the phone/I’m always doing nothing,” she sang on the 2016 album Sensitive, which included a collaboration with Willow Smith called “ Queen of High School.” Her version of bedroom pop is one that clearly aspires to a slick, sophisticated level of production, like that of Jay Som. Growing up, Hana Vu documented her life the only way she knew how: writing songs and packaging them into collections that she put out at the end of each year. Following three-and-a-half years of self-released material from Vu-who has used Bandcamp like an emotional diary, in the vein of Frankie Cosmos and Soccer Mommy- How Many Times is her first release for the label Luminelle Recordings (run by the folks behind the still-kicking MP3-download-era blog Gorilla vs. I Got 12.“Crying on the Subway” is the lead track from her EP, How Many Times Have You Driven By, a coolly minimal collection that the 17-year-old recorded and produced on her own. Listen to “Everybody’s Birthday” below and see the details of Public Storage further down. While “Maker” set Vu’s existential entreaties to a nuanced indie-pop sound that prominently featured the banjo, “Everybody’s Birthday” is more glossy and pop-forward, despite its gloomy lyrics, with a bouncy drum and bass groove at the forefront, and bright keys and guitars aglow against Vu’s striking contralto vocals.Ĭo-produced by Jackson Phillips (Day Wave), Vu’s forthcoming album is named for the storage units she and her family used while moving every few years, a process of carrying personal history forward that Vu connects to her songwriting: “These public expressions of thoughts, feelings, baggage, experiences that accumulate every year and fill little units such as ‘albums.’” She even lived next to a public storage facility while writing the record-a physical manifestation of the metaphor. Vu’s latest song finds the talented 21-year-old exploring her vocal range’s lower reaches, physically evoking the song’s uniquely bleak subject: “the collective misery and depressive introspection one experiences on their birthday, which in this era of being alone, can feel infinite,” as the artist explains in a statement. Her new single “Everybody’s Birthday” is the follow-up to mid-July’s “Maker,” which we hailed as one of that week’s best tracks. Los Angeles-based solo artist Hana Vu has announced her debut album for Ghostly International, Public Storage, coming Nov.
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