New Double-EP from LA-based singer/songwriter Hana Vu, out October 25th on Luminelle Recordings

There are two Hana Vus.

First there’s the cynical Hana. Now 19 years old, she lives in Echo Park. This Hana is worried those months in 2018 she spent on a whirlwind record cycle off her striking first EP How Many Times Have You Driven By might have been bullshit. This Hana is almost too smart for her own good. Her Los Angeles upbringing means she knows—more so than most—that fame and fortune are a faustian albatross.

Then there’s the optimist Hana, who has spent the past five years chasing that dream anyway. This is the Hana that began songwriting at 13 and kept at it until she made that dream a reality with a record deal last year. Despite coming up as a DIY songwriter, the optimist Hana still loves the idea of the old-school manufactured pop sensation. She spends much of her free time binging A-list actress roundtables and mainlining pop culture content, with that fascination ultimately breeding inspiration in the form of her forthcoming double EP, aptly titled Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway.

“Absorbing the way these women dissect their craft and how they see themselves as artists influenced these songs,” Vu says. “I’m super interested in the big-break mentality: we idolize these celebrities, but I’ve always been trying to understand what they were like before they were famous. All of a sudden they get their big break—and now they’re fine, and great forever, and they’re legends. I had that idealization about the entertainment industry. These actresses were like, inspiration, slash aspiration, slash delusion.”

Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway—still as self-produced as the first songs she crafted as a teenager, but now with an engineer to help with mixing—are the sophisticated next level in Vu’s evolution as an artist. They’re two masterfully crafted and complementary releases that showcase incredible sonic maturity for someone who only just moved out of the house she grew up in and graduated high school. They’re the sound of a jaded dreamer who has turned down admission to a prestigious east-coast college to, at long last, make music full-time. They’re the sound of Vu deftly threading together the two sides of herself to become one rising powerhouse artist.

Songs like “At the Party,” which infuses her velvety Lana Del Rey-esque melancholy with an intoxicating disco beat, are still underpinned by that acerbic-yet-vulnerable cognitive dissonance that won over fans from Willow Smith and Soccer Mommy to Pitchfork and the Fader, and got her invited on tour supporting Kilo Kish and Wet. But now they’re more focused, more polished—not to mention catchier. On the dreamy “Fighter,” she maintains her wry, L.A. noir bittersweetness as she confesses starry-eyed ambitions, injecting a refreshingly earnest desire into the simmering existential crisis that has come to be associated with artists of her generation.