Hana Vu

Hana Vu crafts indie rock by anchoring her profound, somber singing amid ethereal textures, chiming guitars, jittery alternative rock drive, and brooding post-punk atmospheres. She first surfaced on file-sharing platforms during 2014 and issued a succession of progressively richer releases that led to her initial label project, the EP How Many Times Have You Driven By, in 2018. Public Storage served as her first full-length statement in 2021 and the earliest occasion she enlisted a co-producer; the same collaborator returned for Romanticism, issued in 2024, which traced her reflections upon entering her twenties.

Living in Los Angeles, Vu took up songwriting before reaching her teens and began posting homemade recordings online while still in early adolescence. Got Got Demos appeared as her opening collection in 2014. The following year’s Outtakes presented atmospheric, introspective constructions built from shifting combinations of guitar, keyboards, drum machine, and stacked vocals, although Nightlife, released in August 2015, found her working with live drums and full-band setups. Sensitive, her 2016 album, contained the track “Queen of High School,” a collaboration with Willow Smith.

A later video for “Crying on the Subway,” however, drew the interest of Chris Cantalini, co-founder of Fat Possum’s Luminelle Recordings imprint, in early 2018. That April she supported Soccer Mommy at a Los Angeles concert, and in June she made her label debut with the EP How Many Times Have You Driven By, then joined indie-pop duo Sales for a U.S. tour. After the EP’s release she finished high school, left her family home, and declined college admission to focus exclusively on music. She toured with Phantogram and Nilufer Yanya before self-producing the double-EP Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway in October 2019.

For her debut album she partnered with Jackson Phillips of Day Wave, who also mixed the sessions and contributed instrumental work; the resulting Public Storage appeared on Ghostly International in November 2021. Four months later the Parking Lot EP collected the new songs “Parking Lot” and “Mr. Lonely” alongside live renditions of material from the album. She returned to the studio with Phillips for her second long-player, extending her sonic range with references to 2000s indie rock, gloomy post-punk, and expansive, introspective synth-and-guitar balladry. Fronted by the singles “Care” and “22,” Romanticism reached stores via Ghostly in April 2024.