Written at the beginning of lockdown, the lyrics, made up of hypothetical questions, express a painful sense of helplessness and futility: “What could you say/ to a man with a gun/ could you say that ‘I’m on my way home/ and I’m already late?’” Soon, however, it becomes more personal: “What could you say to moving on?/ you’re taking too long,” Vu admits, solidifying in one line the themes of self-criticism and awareness that courses through the album like a pulse. “April Fool” is one of the best openings to an album I’ve ever heard – a dense, glimmering piano opening, akin to throwing pebbles into a cold pool of water, echo and reverberate beautifully, making just enough space for Vu’s signature contralto vocals to enter. Inspired by the storage units she was forced to familiarize herself with from moving every few years with her family while growing up, the album speaks to both the idea and essence of compartmentalization – the conscious containment of the material versus the immaterial, what eventually happens when you leave a “ mix of the sacred and the mundane to sit inside concrete and steel.” Vu views albums in a similar way, namely, as “public expressions of thoughts, feelings, baggage, experiences that accumulate every year and fill little units.” In that sense, Public Storage is exactly this, an accumulation of concentrated bursts of memory in one windowless sonic room, each of the twelve boxes and containers of sound packaged differently with the same bright red tape most importantly, it is as if Vu stands before them, knife at the ready. Last week, Hana Vu released her third album Public Storage.

Hana vu public storage review