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.
