Hana Vu Announces New Album Public Storage, Shares “Everybody’s Birthday”

Los Angeles-based solo artist Hana Vu has announced her debut album for Ghostly International, Public Storage, coming Nov. 5. Her new single “Everybody’s Birthday” is the follow-up to mid-July’s “Maker,” which we hailed as one of that week’s best tracks.

Vu’s latest song finds the talented 21-year-old exploring her vocal range’s lower reaches, physically evoking the song’s uniquely bleak subject: “the collective misery and depressive introspection one experiences on their birthday, which in this era of being alone, can feel infinite,” as the artist explains in a statement. While “Maker” set Vu’s existential entreaties to a nuanced indie-pop sound that prominently featured the banjo, “Everybody’s Birthday” is more glossy and pop-forward, despite its gloomy lyrics, with a bouncy drum and bass groove at the forefront, and bright keys and guitars aglow against Vu’s striking contralto vocals.

Co-produced by Jackson Phillips (Day Wave), Vu’s forthcoming album is named for the storage units she and her family used while moving every few years, a process of carrying personal history forward that Vu connects to her songwriting: “These public expressions of thoughts, feelings, baggage, experiences that accumulate every year and fill little units such as ‘albums.’” She even lived next to a public storage facility while writing the record—a physical manifestation of the metaphor.