Stream: Hana Vu, ‘Maker’

Kevin Bronson on July 15th, 2021

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Hana Vu arrived on the indie scene as a teenager, a bedroom pop artist with direct, charismatic songs and the voice to give them gravitas. A couple of EPs and an album-length double-EP later, she’s 21 and forging a commanding presence.

Vu, just signed to Ghostly International, this week released the new single “Maker” that takes her mesmerizing ruminations to a new level. It marks the first time this singer-songwriter has worked with a co-producer; here, it’s Jackson Phillips of Day Wave. Her ascending harmonies over the song’s banjo-and-piano skeleton make it sound greater than the sum of its parts — even as she’s talking to a deity.

“I am not religious,” she says of “Maker,” “but I imagined a sort of desolate character crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more.”

Lucy Sandler directed the video for the tune. “I think we have a lot to learn from children’s versions of reality — their complete and utter presence in the moment, their curiosity and complicated dichotomy of fragility and bravery,” Sandler says. “In ‘Maker,’ I want the little girl to speak to everyone’s inner child, and remind us that nothing has really changed. We are still allowed to feel lost and search for meaning in everything we encounter, that the journey may be long and scary but we will all end up back in the fold of safety eventually or just where we’re meant to be.”

||| Stream: “Maker”