On streaming there are a lot of playlists that are like, ‘Songs for when you’re taking a shower’, ‘Songs for when you’re at the gym’ – just sort of a background score to your life. “I wanted to make music that you can’t ignore. Mostly, she wanted to subvert the way streaming culture encourages music to be taken out of context and tailored for short attention spans. She also wanted the album’s sonics to be “bigger and more intense” than her previous work. “Pop music is for everybody, so it’s interesting to see how everybody takes it, or where it goes,” she says. We hear that in the dancey synth hook of ‘Aubade’ or the big, dreamy chorus of ‘Keeper’. She dug into her pop sensibilities, trying to emulate the likes of St Vincent and Grimes in bringing her own edge to a pop framework. I just did what I wanted without influence.” “Not being around other musicians and musical context really just makes you have nothing to compare yourself to or work off. But making ‘Public Storage’ during lockdown led her to search for her own voice. Vu start playing around LA in different bands when she was 14 years old, and she formed her musical identity at DIY shows, surrounded by punk and surf bands. “I listen to how sad I was and I’m like wow, this person wasn’t even in lockdown.” That’s the perspective that I was writing from.” Strangely enough, at the time the brand new hopelessness of the pandemic hadn’t even arrived yet. I think the perspective is someone who’s just very self-loathing, because when something tells you that you do not deserve good things, or a happy life, then inherently people think there’s something wrong with them. I felt this really punitive, oppressive force. She continues, “I didn’t grow up religious, but I always felt like, if there is some sort of God, he’s really mean. Sometimes you wonder if going through all these hard things is going to make you a better person, or if you’re just sort of taking punches every day. “I was thinking about, ‘How do I get to this next place, and who controls that?’. ‘ I’m nothing but the world’s worst colour, I stain all your skin,’ she sighs on ‘World’s Worst’, while on closing track ‘Maker’ she begs a higher power: ‘ Can you make me anybody else?’ She was envisioning the perspective of someone completely downtrodden and hopeless, an extreme version of her own mindset. Her lyrics across the album probe at ideas of failure, evil, and worthlessness. All I had was this conviction that I can make music and that it will propel me to be somebody that I wanted to be when I was younger.”
I was really desperate to get to a place in my life that I felt safe in, and comfortable. I think I was really obsessed with like, I’m almost an adult, I’m almost at this place where, when I was younger, I had imagined myself being something great. It was really hard to make friends and have a network of support.
Vu felt ungrounded in many ways: “I moved three times in one year or something. “Self-storage is just a collection of my things that I accumulate over time, and that’s what songwriting is to me – notes back to myself of experiences, and stuff I was feeling.” The building felt like a looming metaphor not just for her transitory circumstances, but for the stockpiled emotions in the songs she was writing. Writing the album (which follows up two EPs, 2018’s ‘How Many Times Have You Driven By’ and 2019’s ‘Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway’), Vu was moving between neighbourhoods in Los Angeles and at one point living in the shadow of a huge self-storage building it was this structure that she named her album after. That was sort of the ethos for that song.” “I was thinking that New Years Eve is kind of everybody’s birthday you’re reflecting on your life and you have hopes for the future, but you’re ultimately sad every time the year passes and you aren’t who you wanted to be. Take the menacing ‘Everybody’s Birthday’: with striking vocals and subtly stubborn melodies that evoke Lorde and Lana Del Rey, she pulls you into a dimly-lit New Years Eve party that’s more depression than debauchery. But on her debut album ‘Public Storage’, Vu captures that disillusionment so vividly and viscerally that it’s brand new all over again. It’s an age-old feeling – superstars like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish have encapsulated it on a mainstream level in recent years – and one that stings even harder after key years and moments have been lost to the pandemic. “Now I feel like I’m finally as old as I ever thought I would be, and I wanna be younger again.”
“I really was trying to grow up all the time throughout my teenhood,” says the LA singer-songwriter, just out of bed and chatting via Zoom from her sunny home. Now, at 21, she’s had to find that adulthood isn’t quite as freeing as it sounds.
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