Hana Vu: Romanticism Album Evaluate

Time comes for us all, however Hana Vu is taking it tougher than most. “There’s no track in my coronary heart like I believed there was once I was younger,” she wallows on the primary track of her second album, Romanticism. It’s the type of lament {that a} extra restrained songwriter would possibly make with melancholic resignation, however Vu doesn’t do quiet feelings: She bellows the road as if she’s been mortally wounded or awoken to search out the solar stricken from the sky. She’s not simply getting older—the very material of her being is slipping via her fingers, and she or he’s wrecked.

On Romanticism, Vu channels her despondence into such titanic pop and gleaming rock that you simply don’t really feel her ache a lot as marvel on the magnificence of its show. She sings with an operatic authority that makes even her most hyperbolic assertions land as indeniable fact. “I scream so loud/As a result of I don’t exist no extra,” she writhes over glammy twinned guitars on the album’s rousing farewell to youth “22,” her unrelenting voice prodding the track to a Bowie-esque climax. The irony that she’s nonetheless in her early 20s isn’t misplaced on her, however she has such command over her voice that she actually does appear outdated past her years. Her keening contralto envelops the track as if it’s been conjured from an ocean of epsom salt.

Simply think about how a number of the label A&R in her native Los Angeles may need tried to mould her rock instincts for optimum return: play up the hovering guitars, tie her right into a “Gen Z can rock, too” narrative, and maybe encourage her to throw shade on the state of standard music in interviews. Everyone concerned would in all probability make a mint. Vu’s personal imaginative and prescient isn’t practically so prefabricated. It’s way more nuanced and amenable to the instances, a complement to the stately gloom of Mitski, the TikTok unhappiness of Boygenius, and the alt-rock ear sweet of Olivia Rodrigo. For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it nearly completely with only one different musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop undertaking Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this second.

Melancholy’s unliftable curse hangs heavy over the album. On “Hammer,” Vu pleads for a remedy to an ailment her physician can’t diagnose: “There is no such thing as a reply/However I would like one anyway.” Romanticism’s tone lightens on its extra resigned B-side, as tense rock provides solution to driftier, dreamier materials, however Vu’s malaise by no means clears, regardless of her makes an attempt to harness the ability of optimistic considering. Over a tentative dance-pop pulse, “Desires” imagines an existence the place “it doesn’t damage to be alive,” whereas “Airplane” units a lovelorn fantasy to the buoyant pop-rock of the Killers. A closing suite of three extra love songs challenges the core assertions of the album’s first half, suggesting the basis of Vu’s anguish is likely to be romantic, not simply existential.

Vu’s been kicking across the Los Angeles music scene since she was 14, which can clarify partially why she carries herself like such an outdated soul. She additionally misplaced a chief chunk of her youth to pandemic, time she will’t get again. On Romanticism, she grieves the previous not simply out of nostalgia for one thing that’s been misplaced, but in addition trepidation in regards to the future. “Do you keep in mind getting older?/Are you able to inform me what it’s about?” she sings on “Airplane.” It’s one of many uncommon moments on the album when she sounds hopeful, as if understanding would possibly take a number of the fear away, however in fact, no person can inform her exactly how maturity will unfold. That’s what makes it so horrifying.