Romanticism

Time comes for us all, but Hana Vu is taking it harder than most. “There’s no song in my heart like I thought there was when I was young,” she wallows on the first song of her second album, Romanticism. It’s the kind of lament that a more restrained songwriter might make with melancholic resignation, but Vu doesn’t do quiet emotions: She bellows the line as if she’s been mortally wounded or awoken to find the sun stricken from the sky. She’s not just getting older—the very fabric of her being is slipping through her fingers, and she’s wrecked. On Romanticism, Vu channels her despondence into such titanic pop and gleaming rock that you don’t feel her pain so much as marvel at the magnificence of its display. She sings with an operatic authority that makes even her most hyperbolic assertions land as indisputable truth. “I scream so loud/Because I don’t exist no more,” she writhes over glammy twinned guitars on the album’s rousing farewell to youth “22,” her unrelenting voice prodding the song to a Bowie-esque climax. The irony that she’s still in her early 20s isn’t lost on her, but she has such command over her voice that she really does seem old beyond her years. Her keening contralto envelops the song as if it’s been conjured from an ocean of epsom salt.Just imagine how some of the label A&R in her native Los Angeles might have tried to mold her rock instincts for maximum return: play up the soaring guitars, tie her into a “Gen Z can rock, too” narrative, and perhaps encourage her to throw shade at the state of popular music in interviews. Everybody involved would probably make a mint. Vu’s own vision isn’t nearly so prefabricated. It’s much more nuanced and amenable to the times, a complement to the stately gloom of Mitski, the TikTok sadness of Boygenius, and the alt-rock ear candy of Olivia Rodrigo. For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.Depression’s unliftable curse hangs heavy over the album. On “Hammer,” Vu pleads for a cure to an ailment her doctor can’t diagnose: “There is no answer/But I want one anyway.” Romanticism’s tone lightens on its more resigned B-side, as tense rock gives way to driftier, dreamier material, but Vu’s malaise never clears, despite her attempts to harness the power of positive thinking. Over a tentative dance-pop pulse, “Dreams” imagines an existence where “it doesn’t hurt to be alive,” while “Airplane” sets a lovelorn fantasy to the buoyant pop-rock of the Killers. A closing suite of three more love songs challenges the core assertions of the album’s first half, suggesting the root of Vu’s anguish might be romantic, not just existential.Vu’s been kicking around the Los Angeles music scene since she was 14, which may explain in part why she carries herself like such an old soul. She also lost a prime chunk of her youth to pandemic, time she can’t get back. On Romanticism, she grieves the past not just out of nostalgia for something that’s been lost, but also trepidation about the future. “Do you remember getting older?/Can you tell me what it’s about?” she sings on “Airplane.” It’s one of the rare moments on the album when she sounds hopeful, as if knowing might take some of the worry away, but of course, nobody can tell her precisely how adulthood will unfold. That’s what makes it so frightening.