![]() "I didn't want anything that's too inauthentic or something that screams, 'I am Asian,' because my own Asian identity is very different from that." "I didn't really want to use my Asian identity in an exploitative way, or as a gimmick," says Vu, who is half Vietnamese and half Korean. Though the video's references to Asian-American domesticity are clear, she says the emphasis is meant to be on family life, not her racial identity. On the shimmering "Keeper," inspired in part by Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," Vu grapples with the despair of not being seen: "Oh, all the people you hurt for aren't for you/Oh, all the love that you ask for isn't for you." In the accompanying music video, she breaks down in anguished dancing while a family party, replete with spring rolls and red plastic buckets of spiky rambutan, carries on around her. VIEW GALLERY All clothing by Second/Layer. She shrinks beneath oppressive forces too diffuse to name on the contemplative opening track "April Fool," in which she asks, "What could you say to the light of the sun/Could you say that you're hurting my eyes and to just make it stop?" On the darkly danceable, Lorde-adjacent "Everybody's Birthday," she wearily concedes acceptance: "Everybody knows that it's all end times/And everyone I know is blue." The unease she works through on Public Storage is less well defined-and more menacing-than the heartbreak and self-doubt she tackled previously. "I wanted to make something that was encapsulating or consuming." "I was trying to make a very dense and intrusive kind of music," she says. "But when you're isolated all the time, that's all you're thinking about all the time." Layers upon layers of haunting harmonies and distorted guitars convey this sense of complete immersion. A normal person would probably "ruminate about who you are, what this all is, and what you're doing" only once in a while, Vu conjectures. As a result, the album submerges you in the mind of a person who's had way too much time to think about existence, even though she finished writing before the pandemic began. Much of it could be chalked up to general teenage angst: On both her previous offerings, the acclaimed 2018 EP How Many Times Have You Driven By, and the following year's double EP Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway, Vu delivered droll observations about the melancholy and misery of youth in her husky contralto over the fuzzy guitars and slick electronic basslines of teenage sad-girl bedroom pop.īy the fall of 2019, Vu was spending most of her time meandering around Los Angeles alone, without "a lot going on" other than writing the songs that would eventually become Public Storage. But she was feeling alone long before the lockdowns began. Like most people, Vu has spent the pandemic in isolation, relying on self-motivation and e-mail to get her work done. ![]() When she was making the album, she jokes, "I was like, 'Nothing matters, and it's all horrible,' but now I'm like, 'Nothing matters, but it's okay!'" ![]() For someone who makes such stormy music, she's unexpectedly quick to crack a smile-in this case, a knowing smirk acknowledging that she's only twenty-one years old. ![]() "I feel really old," she tells me over Zoom from her sunny living room, bangs falling around her laughing eyes. ![]()
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