Aided by Jackson Phillips, better known as Day Wave, the two crafted a delicate album about despair and loneliness wrapped in straightforward indie-pop production. Guitar feedback and her rich, warm alto conceal painfully honest lyricism with all the intention and purpose of her predecessors. Vu garners a lot of comparison to her aforementioned peers, as well as Lana del Rey. “I thought it would be cool that it looks nothing like how the record sounds, too.” I wanted to make it look like raw meat,” she explains. “These are legitimately like pieces of me, but in the gross aesthetic that I wanted. Influenced by Bruce Nauman’s Studies for Holograms, which features close-up photographs of manipulated facial expressions, Vu used a high-contrast photo of the inside of her mouth as the artwork for Public Storage. When approached with the idea of following the expectation to make her face the cover of her debut, Vu took this to the extreme. This is found most prominently in the artwork for all of her releases, none of which show her face. In a social media-obsessed world, in which many young people such as herself are typecast as tech-tethered, Vu has struck a perfect balance with her public persona. Vu navigates the world like a budding philosopher, fiercely protective of her ideas and identity. Despite this, Vu never really made any longterm internet friends, despite spending a large amount of her time on a site that bred vibrant communities surrounding music and aesthetics. Turns out we both existed before stan accounts became more widely acceptable, with Vu operating a Grimes fan blog (and chuckling when I tell her about my old Death Grips blog). Under her breath, she tests the waters by mentioning Tumblr. It can be concerning, but upon further discussion with Vu, we come to the conclusion that such self-deprecation is a product of the Internet. Underneath the fuzzy guitars and Vu’s crisp, liquid vocals is the innate desire to question and confront, doused with a healthy amount of shame. Vu wrangles with guilt across Public Storage in an earnest display of vulnerability, whether admitting “Evil is my name, I guess I earned it” on “Everybody’s Birthday,” or “I’m just the world’s worst talker” on “World’s Worst.” Vu manages to capture tiny moments of anxiety and grief, magnifying them until they become tangible and impossible to ignore. “When I was a teen, that’s where all the cool kids were! They were always at the warehouse shows over the weekends. It all started with a simple desire: to belong. These scattered and scrappy memories of growing up in the punk and indie underground of a city as big as Los Angeles were crucial to Vu. “Then again, I mostly would play in parking lots or under an underpass … or in a bus.” When they closed down, or moved locations or whatever, people lost general interest,” Vu explains. There were a couple all ages, venues that were really big. anymore, but maybe I’m just like, you know, too old now to be in the know about it. “I don’t really see that there’s like a big DIY team community in L.A. That’s not to say the scene isn’t still alive, but a lot changed as Vu grew. She has been cultivating her sound since she was only 14, playing in bands around the once-burgeoning Los Angeles underground scene. Previous coverage of Vu has focused on her age and, to be fair, it is hard to separate Vu’s unbelievable talent from her youth. I catch myself forgetting Vu is only a few years younger than me, as she possesses an immense knowledge and wisdom that comes with being surrounded by the energy of Los Angeles. Whereas Taylor Swift crafted heartfelt confessionals of love and loss (and eventually revisited Red through a more mature lens), Vu expands upon the groundwork laid by sad-girl heroes such as Swift, Japanese Breakfast and Mitski with her own adolescent flair as she confronts the universe with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge ahead of her. Vu has entered her 20s with the breathtaking debut Public Storage, released in November. I didn’t mean to affirm that you looked like garbage.” However, I believe even if I did look bad, Vu would see the beauty in it. I apologize for my disheveled appearance, to which Vu replies, “That’s okay! Sorry, you look amazing. Hana Vu and I greet each other over Zoom and discover that we are both seated on the floor, backs against our couches, with our laptops on our coffee tables. This is the return of The Best of What’s Next, a monthly profile column which highlights new acts with big potential-the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music. For years, Paste has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers.
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