Hana Vu has released a a new visualizer for “Everybody’s Birthday.” The single, is the follow-up to “Maker,” and off her debut album for Ghostly International Public Storage. The album is named after the public storage spaces the 21-year old Vu and her family would regularly use moving every few years. Vu sees the art of making and releasing songs in a similar sense: “these public expressions of thoughts, feelings, baggage, experiences that accumulate every year and fill little units such as ‘albums.’” She lived next to one of these buildings when she started writing Public Storage and its towering presence lends a metaphor to a record that sounds far bigger than the bedroom it came from. Across the album, Vu excavates an internal universe, loading and unpacking memories, moods, and imagined scenes with brooding introspection, agency, charisma, and conviction.

Public Storage builds on the sound of this earlier work. It underscores her strengths as a songwriter with a deeper sense of luster, sophistication, and urgency. She calls it “very invasive and intense sounding music,” refreshingly out of step with contemporary trends; this is music to engage with rather than lean back to. For the first time, she welcomes a co-producer, Jackson Phillips (Day Wave).

“I am not religious, but when writing these songs I imagined a sort of desolate character crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more,” explains Vu, who prefers abstractly personal over directly autobiographical lyrics. New single “Everybody’s Birthday” speaks to the evil absurdity of the present. “It’s about the collective misery and depressive introspection one experiences on their birthday, which in this era of being alone, can feel infinite.” The night is red, the mood is blue, and her character’s shame is painted gold. It’s a rhythmic, hook-heavy number and one of the album’s most striking moments.

Hana Vu
Public Storage
Tracklist
Ghostly International

1. April Fool
2. Public Storage
3. Aubade
4. Heaven
5. Keeper
6. Gutter
7. My House
8. World’s Worst
9. Anything Striking
10. Everybody’s Birthday
11. I Got
12. Maker

Pre-order Public Storage by Hana Vu HERE