Hana Vu Knows You're Feeling Lonely

Hana Vu is deciding whether to become a pop star or a rock star. It's a good position to be in: After the arduous but cathartic experience of writing and releasing Public Storage, her first full-length album, in November, she's finally ready to look ahead. The album, a gorgeously dense and jarringly introspective collection of guitar-driven songs about searching for meaning but coming up short, is an impressive achievement for the Los Angeles-based musician, but making it, she says, was exhausting.

"I feel really old," she tells me over Zoom from her sunny living room, bangs falling around her laughing eyes. For someone who makes such stormy music, she's unexpectedly quick to crack a smile—in this case, a knowing smirk acknowledging that she's only twenty-one years old. When she was making the album, she jokes, "I was like, 'Nothing matters, and it's all horrible,' but now I'm like, 'Nothing matters, but it's okay!'"

Like most people, Vu has spent the pandemic in isolation, relying on self-motivation and e-mail to get her work done. But she was feeling alone long before the lockdowns began. Much of it could be chalked up to general teenage angst: On both her previous offerings, the acclaimed 2018 EP How Many Times Have You Driven By, and the following year's double EP Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway, Vu delivered droll observations about the melancholy and misery of youth in her husky contralto over the fuzzy guitars and slick electronic basslines of teenage sad-girl bedroom pop.

By the fall of 2019, Vu was spending most of her time meandering around Los Angeles alone, without "a lot going on" other than writing the songs that would eventually become Public Storage. As a result, the album submerges you in the mind of a person who's had way too much time to think about existence, even though she finished writing before the pandemic began. A normal person would probably "ruminate about who you are, what this all is, and what you're doing" only once in a while, Vu conjectures. "But when you're isolated all the time, that's all you're thinking about all the time." Layers upon layers of haunting harmonies and distorted guitars convey this sense of complete immersion. "I was trying to make a very dense and intrusive kind of music," she says. "I wanted to make something that was encapsulating or consuming."

The unease she works through on Public Storage is less well defined—and more menacing—than the heartbreak and self-doubt she tackled previously. She shrinks beneath oppressive forces too diffuse to name on the contemplative opening track "April Fool," in which she asks, "What could you say to the light of the sun/Could you say that you're hurting my eyes and to just make it stop?" On the darkly danceable, Lorde-adjacent "Everybody's Birthday," she wearily concedes acceptance: "Everybody knows that it's all end times/And everyone I know is blue."

On the shimmering "Keeper," inspired in part by Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," Vu grapples with the despair of not being seen: "Oh, all the people you hurt for aren't for you/Oh, all the love that you ask for isn't for you." In the accompanying music video, she breaks down in anguished dancing while a family party, replete with spring rolls and red plastic buckets of spiky rambutan, carries on around her. Though the video's references to Asian-American domesticity are clear, she says the emphasis is meant to be on family life, not her racial identity. "I didn't really want to use my Asian identity in an exploitative way, or as a gimmick," says Vu, who is half Vietnamese and half Korean. "I didn't want anything that's too inauthentic or something that screams, 'I am Asian,' because my own Asian identity is very different from that."

In the video for "Maker," a soaring track reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens that Vu describes as "the thesis statement of what I wanted this record to be," a little girl wanders the streets of Los Angeles, jostling through crowds and riding the subway to an empty beach. It ends with the child floating on her back as the sun sets, completely alone except for an old teddy bear clutched in her arm. Vu says she chose to cast a child because they "don't really have a lot of power or control in society or in their own lives." And, she adds with a grin, "Who doesn't like to see a little cute kid?"

While making Public Storage, she says, "I was so desperate to make my life something that I wanted to be proud of and wanted all these things I didn’t have." Now that she's done so, "I'm finally at a place where I can have a little bit of freedom to indulge in living." That means preparing to play live shows on both coasts in the coming months, beginning to write a "more intentional" follow-up album, and "not taking everything so seriously."

And with the newfound space from her brooding teenage self, Vu is starting to think about who she wants to become next. All the self-reflection she's done in the past few years, however, seems to have already made the choice clear. "Deep in your heart, you always want to be a pop star because everybody wants to be a pop star. But I feel like there's no glory in being a pop star," she says. "I'm leaning toward rock star."

Public Storage is out now. Vu begins her United States tour March 20 at Schubas, Chicago.