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Hana Vu’s been making music since high school, with a full-length debut and several EPs behind her of glowy, brooding anthems of abstraction and emotion. The Los Angeles-based songwriter signed with
Ghostly International in 2021 to release
Public Storage, followed by the
Parking Lot EP in 2022. Her second LP,
Romanticism, arrives in 2024.
Vu's relationship with music began when she picked up a guitar her dad had lying around and taught herself to play. She'd wake up and listen to LA's ALT 98.7, home to '90s and '00s alternative rock. Later she found the local DIY scene, 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. But what I was listening to at that time [
St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens] was very different from what I performed."
In 2014, at age 14, she started keeping a journal of bedroom pop experiments on Bandcamp, developing her sound across a series of self-releases, including a low-key Willow Smith collaboration and covers of
The Cure and
Phil Collins. Her 2018 single "Crying on the Subway" caught the ear of
Gorilla vs. Bear, who released Vu's self-produced debut EP,
How Many Times Have You Driven By, on their Luminelle Recordings imprint. Early coverage came from Pitchfork, Billboard, 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. As a live performer, Vu has supported the likes of
Soccer Mommy, Nilufer Yanya, Courtney Barnett, Kilo Kish, and
Phantogram.
2021's
Public Storage marked her first LP with Ghostly and her first time working with a co-producer,
Jackson Phillips (Day Wave). Several press profiles emerged around the release; The Los Angeles Times dubbed Vu "LA's indie-pop prodigy," and NME's headline read, "Hana Vu's contemplative indie-pop captures the disillusionment of young adulthood." Her new LP
Romanticism furthers that sentiment as a coming-of-age work that mourns the impermanence of youth and searches for meaning.