Romanticism
Hana Vu’s 2024 album *Romanticism* finds the singer stuck between two worlds, eager to embrace maturity and adulthood while wishing the relative simplicity of childhood was still available to her. It‘s a thread that weaves throughout her guitar-driven fourth album, which is built around infectious melodies, incisive lyrics, and moments of solace and triumph that comfortably intermingle. On the project’s first single “Care,” Vu’s opening refrain is an almost audible sigh. She sings: “I\'m waking up to the sun and I find it all too much/Oh, here we go, another day, another name I can\'t bring up.” On “22,” acoustic guitars build against Vu’s powerful voice as she yearns for simpler times. The nostalgia is nearly palpable, but it’s never saccharine. She croons: “At the bar and they\'re playing our song/It sounds like summer and white guitars.” The chorus is deceptively emblematic of the entire album, stuck between the joy of growing and the lingering impostor syndrome that comes with it. “I\'m just getting old/I\'m just 22,” she adds.
With her forceful contralto and skyscraping pop-rock, the Los Angeles songwriter’s second album is a dramatic chronicle of exiting young adulthood into an uncertain future.
With Romanticism, Vu exceeds the notable tensions of Public Storage – at once confessional and deflective, self-possessed and dissociative, direct and elusive.
On 'Romanticism,' Los Angeles singer-songwriter Hana Vu arrives a little wiser and makes sadness eminently danceable
There is a certain rose-colored magic imparted upon adolescence by those who’ve left it behind. The days of youth are meant to be the best of your life, the days you will look back on and treasure long after they’ve faded into the rearview.
You only have to look at the cover of 'Romanticism' to recognise the emotional extremes at the core of Hana Vu’s latest record. In this recreation of the
'Romanticism' emerges as a whole, as Hana Vu's space to ask some big questions, though the answers she's receiving are mostly ambivalent at best.