This is the root tenderness of Hannah Jadagu’s debut record Aperture, through miraculous and capricious technology, someone who is my age can locate their own map to success, using the internet as their megaphone. Where Jadagu may lack full control over soundcraft or songwriting, she proves instinct alone to be a righteous alternative to experience.
Being a debut that transitions a young artist from bedroom pop, it runs into the splendidly youthful problem of sometimes having too many neat ideas at once. “Six Months” in particular is bustling with beat transitions and tonal shifts, admirably trying to create versatility where a strong core needed more annunciation. However, this is not a recurrent issue with the project, as Jadagu is intent on delivering reverb-heavy vocal manipulations, airy synths, and thick, distorted percussion on most tracks, including highlights “Say It Now” and “What You Did.”
Feeling as if the fundamental sounds of the record are becoming one-note while also being startled by eclectic production choices is a unique problem for any record to have, but it is a superior problem to vie for. It’s a defiance of rules that she was wise to never learn.
Even if many of the hooks end right before you think they should, the lyrics adorning them are often nuggets of modern love and angst. Jadagu earns a hero’s welcome on Aperture, bridging over from relatable into representative. Climax “Letter to Myself” is simply put, and smartly so; it pictures the gap between childhood expectations and adult realities as a tragic matter of fact. Combined with the lyrically adjacent closer, “Your Thoughts Are Ur Biggest Obstacle,” the final moments of the record show that beneath modern relationships, a modern self-destruction is present. Aperture is comfortable in portraying the uneasiness of love in humanity’s twilight hour.
In between delicate acoustic tracks and autotune wizardry, every instance of zany soundcraft is undercut by this modern emotional turbulence that is both fragile and unplaceable. The reverb may be the culprit; it gives a space above each track for the notes to fizzle out into the auditory void. It could lie in Jadagu’s notebook lyrics, where she misjudges, intuits, and feels her way into romantic understanding. However, why this record is an unpleasant pleasantry is more because of a facet of nature: creation and destruction are the same process, and happen all at once. So if modernity is an inferno, then Jadagu is a star, pressure-cooked by it into this hectic life.
