![]() ![]() "It feels good to breathe some extra life into the record," Vu adds. The EP's four live versions - performed with co-producer Jackson Phillips (Day Wave), Henry Moser (Henry Nowhere), Nick de Ryss, and Mike Parvizi - hint at how the arrangements of Public Storage translate on stage. "Quit your longing / it's alright," she sings, ultimately suggesting that "it's better to be alone." Lonely delivers a real-talk refute of his starry-eyed love, Vu's character serves it with compassion. Calling it a response of sorts to Bobby Vinton's 1962 ballad of a homesick soldier, Vu explains, "I thought that the sentiments of the original song were almost pathetic when put into today's context." While this correspondence back to Mr. In contrast, the bittersweet "Mr Lonely" unravels gently across strums and strings. "I was just reflecting on how my perspective on music, performance, existence has changed since then and how differently I go about those things now," says Vu. She pins the rugged indie rock sound to her teenage years, playing parking lot and backyard shows. "Parking Lot" chugs at full speed motorik bass and drum patterns collide with buzzing guitar and urgent lines of introspection. The two new singles encompass the range of Vu's pop songcraft. The latter describes the Los Angeles-based artist as possessing "an improbably deep repertoire, having been born to an era of indie artists who graduated swiftly from lock-and-key diaries to Bandcamp pages." The release also looks ahead to live shows in 2022, Vu's first chance to perform the material from her full-length Ghostly debut, acclaimed by the likes of NME, NPR, and The New Yorker. A postscript to her 2021 Public Storage album, Hana Vu's Parking Lot EP surfaces two new songs alongside four album tracks recorded live. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. ![]() (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. But she hums along, staying cool and coiled, teaching herself how to reset. “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. “Everybody’s crying in the hallway,” Vu moans. 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. ![]() “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. “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.”Ĭritics 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. Instead she keeps a calculated distance, opting for intricacy over intimacy. 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. 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. 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 co-produced the album, which oscillates between bright coils of pop (“Keeper,” “Aubade”) and blasts of drums and guitar. “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. Vu sings about heaven burning, about pleading with the sun, about dreaming in gold. These are opaque songs about armageddon, gesturing at morose feelings and crammed with abstract statements. On Public Storage, Vu’s official debut and her first release for Ghostly, that emotional core diffuses. ![]()
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