“Do you remember getting older? Can you tell me what it’s about?” Hana Vu asks on “Airplane,” a Killers-esque pop-rock anthem from her sumptuous sophomore album. Romanticism, out today via Ghostly International, is an album that asks more questions than it answers. The 23 year-old singer songwriter, named “LA’s indie-pop prodigy” by the Los Angeles Times, questions and recontextualizes everything: her past, her place in the world, and what it means to be young.
Sitting on a concrete bench at a noisy intersection in Koreatown, Vu tells Teen Vogue she discarded her usual rigid thinking and wrote this record by looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. “I really tried to think about putting things in different contexts,” Vu elaborates. “Changing your perspective is like a choose-your-own-adventure of how you’re supposed to live and feel on any given day.”
Photos by Juan Velasquez
She describes herself as “naturally downtrodden,” but looking back at the album now, she’s surprised that “it wasn’t as sad as it could be.” Things have shifted for her over these past few years. “I feel like a pretty optimistic and hopeful person. I didn’t think that was a part of my personal narrative, but I think it is a part of me that I have realized after listening to the record.”
Vu speaks with the wisdom of a world-weary elder, even as she playfully asks me what adulthood is like: “Your frontal cortex is developed, mine isn’t,” she notes. On the anthemic ballad “22,” she sings in her contralto croon,“I’m just getting old. I’m just 22,” which can be interpreted earnestly or sarcastically — just how she likes it. “I don’t even feel that young anymore because of TikTok,” she adds wryly. “I’m not the youngest person alive anymore.”