The Los Angeles singer and songwriter’s full-length debut is grandiose and opaque, opting for intricacy over intimacy.
When Hana Vu started releasing music, she was a high schooler straining a muddle of teenage emotions into slick, sparse electropop. She wrung her angst and ache through simple, glum images: crying on the subway, staring blankly at the ocean. In 2019, she expanded her blasé bedroom pop into a conceptual dual EP about Nicole Kidman and Anne Hathaway. She used the actresses as architecture, homing in on the drama of a party or a fateful text message. Her voice sounded faraway at times, distorted through fuzz, and listening felt like eavesdropping on confessions. She wanted to be saved and she wanted to be strong; she wanted answers and she wanted absolution; she wanted and wanted.
On Public Storage, Vu’s official debut and her first release for Ghostly, that emotional core diffuses. These are opaque songs about armageddon, gesturing at morose feelings and crammed with abstract statements. Vu sings about heaven burning, about pleading with the sun, about dreaming in gold. “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. But the music is potent. Vu co-produced the album, which oscillates between bright coils of pop (“Keeper,” “Aubade”) and blasts of drums and guitar. 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 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. 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. Instead she keeps a calculated distance, opting for intricacy over intimacy. “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.”
Critics 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. “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. 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. “Everybody’s crying in the hallway,” Vu moans. “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. But she hums along, staying cool and coiled, teaching herself how to reset.
Buy: Rough Trade
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