“Loca” Apologizes - I’ve Been Absent

Hey friends, apologies for the hiatus (again) - I am working out the kinks of life change, learning and developing skills for my career (ew), and balancing this passion project! With that, I am aiming at bringing this to you as frequently as I possibly can —> properly defined cadence be damned.

I hope you can appreciate this gif. Iconic, if we’re being real here. THAT’S BESIDES THE POINT KINDA! This newsletter is all about music, album recs, genre deep dives n shit, and good times with good people (but also jokes, stupid callbacks, and a fk load of puns). Time to rock some tunes! Let’s jump into some more indie alternative/pop, as you can very easily tell, a big enjoyment of mine. But first…

What the hell is indie? I hear the term everywhere

Indie just simply means independent. It is, generally speaking, characterized by artists/musicians taking lots of creative freedoms, usually low budget (i.e. usually no labels with big contracts, home studios, etc.), and sort of the do-it-yourself. Indie is largely understood as an experimenting “label” applied to music. So indie is not actually a genre, but an extra descriptor applied to a genre of music.

This would bring us to → indie rock, indie folk, indie alternative, etc. So you can have these typically smaller (less followers/budget) artists in the rock/folk/alt/etc. genres have their own space that is more descriptive of how they got their sound, a notion or precursor for their music. The DIY ethos of indie music creates such a dynamic that is compelling, thought-provoking, and non-conformist in a way that is so very impactful for me.

Okay… cool… but what are we jamming this week?

We are going to be jamming some indie alternative/pop! With that, Hana Vu enters the chat. Hana Vu is an artist from Los Angeles (of Vietnamese and Korean descent) and really started at a young age writing tunes. She was writing music at 14, and then began opening for some TOP notch artists in Soccer Mommy and Wet.

Hana really tickled the groovy drummer part of my brain with the song Parking Lot off of the Parking Lot EP released in ‘22, which just so happened to be the first time I heard her music. This led me down the path of just discovering her sound and finding myself overjoyed, honestly enamored, at the GOLD I was hearing. I was like woah, where the f*** has she been (loca)? ←we love a callback

Diving backwards in her discography led me into a soundscape that shoe-gazy stans lose their shit over. Public Storage has grit, synthesizers galore, ambient AND “chuggy” guitars, and the breathy/airy vocals I had come to expect from Hana. To give you some recs before the rec, I’d check out Gutter, Aubade, and I Got off the Public Storage LP. With that, I think this record is sort of a coming of age… and this leads into the rec for this week.

Rec Time My Friends! 🥵 

Hana Vu - Romanticism. The mix on this is so damn satisfying. I’ve found that it plays wonderfully on every sound system I’ve elected to jam it on - so that’s reassuring. Listening to this provoked feeling nostalgic, warm, vulnerable, and open when taking the auditory journey. The textures she creates with the synth and her vocals is just such a nice characteristic to this album. There are moments that feel cinematic.

album rating - 9.1/10, fave track - 22

I do sincerely apologize for the drop-off here. With that, I do hope you all have enjoyed this week’s Finetuned! I appreciate any insights, opinions, thoughts, admiration, or otherwise. You can direct that towards my email or DM me on Twitter. ([email protected])

Please do share Finetuned with your friends & fam! I believe great music should be shared, cherished, and understood from all sorts of perspectives.

See you all in the next one! 🙌