Kevin Bronson on August 19th, 2021

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Catching up with the latest singles from forthcoming releases by Hana Vu, Magdalena Bay and Nik Freitas …

HANA VU, “Everybody’s Birthday”

Last month, 21-year-old Hana Vu released the single “Maker” and announced her signing to Ghostly International. This week, she unveiled “Everybody’s Birthday,” which arrived with the news that her debut album, “Public Storage,” will be out Nov. 5. That title likens albums to storage units: “These public expressions of thoughts, feelings, baggage, experiences that accumulate every year and fill little units such as ‘albums,’” she says. And this latest parcel? Bummer pop with a restless rhythm. “It’s about the collective misery and depressive introspection one experiences on their birthday,” Vu says, “which in this era of being alone, can feel infinite.”

MAGDALENA BAY, “Secrets (Your Fire)”

Following the sugary bombast of “Chaeri,” Magdalena Bay — Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin — return with “Secrets (Your Fire),” the latest bounce from their album “Mercurial World” (out Oct. 8). It’s retro, oh-so-catchy and magnificently produced, but like so many indie-pop duos theirs is an 8-bit vision in a high-def world. Of the song, the duo says: “‘Secrets’ is about interconnectivity, privacy and digital anxiety. It’s also about a need to keep sharing, to keep giving up more and more of yourself to faceless strangers in the hopes of making friends or fans.”

NIK FREITAS, “After the Fire”

The follow-up to “Good News” and “Regretfully Yours,” “After the Fire” is the latest single from Nik Freitas’ new EP, “Searching for Device,” out Sept. 17. Penned during last year’s California wildfires, it’s finds Freitas atypically expansive and soundscape-ish, searching as he is for “some light after the fire.” Says Freitas: “We had a big window facing west, [and] all you could see was smoke. The cars were covered in ash. I think the fires mixed with this growing virus spreading everywhere, it just felt like everything was under siege or something. The lyrics for this song are reflections of life during the shutdown. Waiting for it all to be over. I wanted the bridge in this one to be different from the rest of the song instrumentally, and with a tinge of hope in it.”