For the briefest second, it sounds like Hana Vu has rounded a real corner on her latest single, “Care”. As the song opens with gentle yet insistent strumming, she sings, “I’m wakin’ up to the sun” – yay! – “and I find it all too much” – ah.
She continues, “Oh, here we go, another day, another name we can’t bring up.” As this line makes quite clear, her new album Romanticism (out 3 May via Ghostly), very much deals with aging and fading youth. Having gotten her start early, Vu has always sounded beyond her years (a description that’d doubtlessly have her rolling her eyes), but with Romanticism, she’s reached yet another level of insightful, starkly blunt songwriting.
As the album’s title addresses, there are (oh so) many rose-tinted perspectives on memories of youth, but true to form, Hana Vu is mining the trope from a very different perspective: a painful one. “I was recently so close to childhood,” she shares, “At the cusp of becoming a more capable and mature person, I feel grief for my naivete.“
This gives way to the weariness that comes along with aging that so many of us feel: “Being young, there’s so much that I experience for the first time, all the time. But as I experience more things, I become more desensitized to those things. You get wiser–– I feel quite wiser–– but less fervent, less hopeful.“
So, then, Romanticism both tackles this very fatigue as well as existing in the duality of still being quite young while feeling the weight of lost hope and the suffocating nature of present, perpetually online culture, as influenced by 1700s Europe as it is our modern world.
“Care” is the perfect introduction to this mood, with Vu delivering her signature seemingly simple, yet deeply emotive and thoughtful, lyrics.
Check out the video below or find it on streamers.
Hana Vu’s new album Romanticism is out 3 May via Ghostly (pre-order/save).
You can find Vu on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
