AJ O'Leary

about • portfolio • essays • reviews • contact

Album Review: Hannah Diamond, “Reflections”

“I was born on my own, and I’ll dance on my own!”

When I was a young adult, barely removed from high school and finding my footing in the real world, I fell in with a very curious online collective. The Internet was my free-form sanctuary tucked away from my real life in the stifling Midwestern United States, and it was there that I joined up with a loose-knit group of artists producing things along the lines of what you might know as vaporwave. (If you don’t know what vaporwave is, you might know what this is.) I functioned as a hanger-on, endearing myself to graphic designers and musicians more talented than myself with my writing. In turn, the standouts in that scene and worlds adjacent to it became my celebrities.

One such celebrity in an adjacent space was Hannah Diamond. Brought to light by the PC Music label, best known for their involvement in Charli XCX’s rise to pop stardom and their influence on the Miley Cyrus Black Mirror episode, the cherubic, fashionable East Anglia native appeared as most of us did in that world: suddenly and from out of nowhere with a saccharine splash of light and dazzle. Her first single, 2013’s Pink and Blue, was a paint-by-numbers bubblegum pop song about hungering after someone’s love, recorded with copious amounts of Auto-Tune and a pacing that could best be described as the auditory uncanny valley. I was hooked, and wanted more.

Unfortunately for us, while Ms. Diamond’s career flourished in other disciplines, most notably as a visual artist, her musical output fell by the wayside. A few songs came out in the following years, like 2016’s Make Believe and Fade Away and 2018’s True, tracks that — while great, at least to me — still did little to move her total body of work past songs you could count on your fingers. Vaporwave and all other cyberpunk-esque, consumerism-parodying Internet wavelengths similar to it, well, faded away, and so too did my hopes that Hannah Diamond would ever put out a full-length album.

Fast forward to November 22, 2019 and here, with next to no fanfare in the circles I used to hear about her new music from, we finally have Hannah Diamond’s full-length debut: Reflections.

Originally planned for a 2016 release, Reflections seems aware of its lateness from the jump: its album art, featuring Ms. Diamond atop a Mac Tonight-esque moon against a black background, looks into your soul as if to say: Yes, that weird Internet subculture that alienated you from your normie friends six years ago is dead and buried, except for me.

Track one, the title track, is much the same: opening with glitchy, low-fi synth and a toy box melody, I feel as though I’m tuning a radio into a numbers station sending out snippets from an alternate timeline where this part of my life and the lives of so many others never came to a sputtering end. It’s a dreamlike song, if the dream is Rose’s at the end of Titanic and you’re ascending a grand staircase to a time that no longer exists, where all your friends who are no longer in your inner circle are welcoming you back and inviting you to party with them.

Track two, Invisible, takes those warm feels and throws them into an industrial-grade blender. A spare, twinkling fragment of music in keeping with Ms. Diamond’s long-established tendency to sing shimmering songs that are actually pretty fucking sad beneath the sweetness when you listen to the lyrics, it prominently features the line “I was born on my own, and I’ll dance on my own!”. Despite knowing this to be the line and looking at the lyric sheet as I listened, my brain repeatedly internalized it as “I was born on my own, and I’ll die on my own!”, likely giving a window into the mood this album evokes in me. Am I okay?

What follows isn’t anything revolutionary, though the aforementioned songs released years ago like True and Make Believe (the latter being a big, rhythmic smash and perhaps her best song) and her cover of Gareth Emery’s Concrete Angel stand up well in their own right. If you already had a positive opinion of Ms. Diamond, like me, you’ll either be similarly nonplussed or love it. If you still have no idea who she is, you might find yourself very confused, though other critics are (mostly) liking it. A style of music championed by people with nostalgia for the past feels nostalgic in its own right these days. Maybe this is what PC Music wanted all along. Maybe nostalgia all the way down is just what getting older feels like, and Reflections is just a departure from youthful innocence.

All told, Reflections feels less like a triumphant, earnest start to a 28-year old’s solo career and more like the mournful exclamation point on a closed chapter of Internet history. Though I fully expect Ms. Diamond to release more albums in the future and very much hope she does so, Reflections would work just as well as a goodbye message. It may be the most jaded debut album I’ve heard since I Created Disco. I couldn’t think of a more fitting album release for the end of the wildest, strangest decade of my young life.

Overall Score: 4 / 5

If you liked this review, let me know.

Click here to view my other reviews.