FEATURE: Spotlight: Hannah Diamond — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Hannah Diamond

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ONE of the biggest and most anticipated…

albums of the year comes from the superb Hannah Diamond. On 6th October, Perfect Picture is with us. Written and composed by Hannah Amond (Hannah Diamond) & David Gamson, with production by David Gamson, singles such as Perfect Picture and Affirmations confirm that London-based Diamond has a very long future ahead! A visual artist who is in control of her image, there is this confidence and autonomy that means her music and promotion is authentic. There will be more press interviews with her ahead of the release of Perfect Picture. Following 2019’s Reflections, there will be many eyes on Diamond and Perfect Picture. She is an artist who is going to make this remarkable statement very soon! Already being discussed as modern icon, it feels almost like I am late to the party spotlighting her - although she is still rising and her best days are ahead. I am going to start with a couple of older interviews. In 2020, a matter of weeks before the pandemic started, Diamond was getting a lot of buzz and love. It was an unfortunate time perhaps to highlight this wonderful young artist! That said, Hannah Diamonds music was a source of great strength and uplift for so many people at a very challenging time. Four years later, we get to see the next phase for Diamond’s music. DIY’s 2020 interview with Diamond is one I want to highlight first. There are a few sections that caught my eye:

“Speaking over the phone from Berlin on the day after the UK general election (“If I was at home, I’d probably be sitting on the sofa, watching the politics channel and feeling pretty disheartened,”) Hannah is freshly out of doing her first ever headline shows. Although she’s done live shows previously, supporting Charli XCX and as part of the PC Music showcases, this is the first time she’s performed to a crowd who have paid specifically to see her. Oh, and all three shows sold out. Obvs. “That’s kind of blown my mind,” Hannah gushes. “I’ve been really overwhelmed by it all, to be honest.”

It’s not a surprise that she’s reached this point, even though it’s been a fairly long journey to get here. A core member of PC Music since the very start, and with her first single released in 2013, Hannah’s debut has been hotly anticipated for years. First announced in 2016 as an EP, ‘Reflections’ has since morphed into an impressive full-length debut that is a moving package of heartbreak and despair, wrapped up with a shiny pop bow. But why the wait? “Because of how the first lot of music that I dropped went down, it felt like I was always under a lot of pressure,” Hannah, *ahem*, reflects. “I didn’t feel like I had the space to make mistakes. I wanted to take my time to make [this album] something that was really good and that I was proud of, and make sure that I could really feel like I stood behind every song. I really didn’t want there to be any filler tracks on the album; I worked really hard on it to make it feel coherent. But I feel like I’ve done it and I feel really happy with it, and that’s the main thing.”

Coherency and consistency are a big theme in both Hannah’s musical and visual output, to the point where she will famously sit retouching a photo she’s taken for hours on end. Does she then see herself as more of an artist or a musician? “I definitely think the feeling of what I am flexes quite a lot,” she muses. “Right now, and especially today, I feel more like a music artist than I do a visual artist. But I know that in January when I’ve got some downtime, I’ll probably primarily be a visual artist for that month.

“I can’t drop the visual work because I enjoy it too much. I need to learn how to navigate doing both somehow, because I think I’d be really unhappy if I had to stop. But I’m excited that I’m feeling more like a music artist at the moment, because it means that if my music starts going really well, it means that a lot of the visual work that I get to do will be personal work, and that’s the stuff that I enjoy the most. The more resources I have to work on personal stuff, the better. Every artist would like that.”

It feels inevitable that Hannah’s music will start taking off in the way she hopes. The PC Music sound has permeated the mainstream through Charli XCX, who has always been a staunch supporter of the pop outliers. In fact, A. G. Cook was the primary producer on her third album 'Charli'. “She’s been repping it for us, which is really cool, because definitely at the start, a lot of people thought what we were doing was pretty weird,” Hannah gleams. “It’s exciting that people are coming round to it.”

As more people tune into Hannah Diamond, she’s got big plans for 2020. “New decade! Shit, that’s crazy isn’t it?” She’s already working on a lot more new music, wants to photograph more pop stars, and has plans to add more live dates at the start of the year. “I’m slightly scared about doing more shows because this little leg that I’ve just done has been pretty interesting and eye-opening. I’m getting an idea of how performing this album affects me emotionally. There’s quite a lot of ups and downs, and I haven’t really experienced that before because I’ve just been doing shows with other people and for other people. It’s very different doing your own, but I’m excited to do a lot more, and work out a way that I can keep myself level’”.

Also in January 2020, CLASH spoke with Diamond after a triumphant gig in London. As part of the creative nexus of PC Music label/movement, Diamond’s aesthetic, collaborators and imagery is thought out – which, as CLASH note, also applied to her live shows. This was someone who was not being directed by the industry and moulded into something commercial and fake. A pure artist who was inspiring to watch come through:

“There’s an old saying that an artist has their entire life to work on their debut album. With that in mind, what’s the meaning of the name ‘Reflections’?

The album is named after the track 'Reflections' on my album. For me it’s the most important track as I feel it really summarises the sentiment of the whole album and for me really contextualises every other song. It’s about having this image in your head about who you are based on someone else’s opinion of your worth. And slowly starting to realise that the picture you have of yourself is wrong.

That the relationship was a mirror that magnified the ways in which you weren’t compatible with that person and that you are perfect just the way you are. It’s about getting over someone and learning to transfer the love you had for them back onto your self.

You first gained attention as part of the PC Music coterie, how do you approach that term now?

For me, things with PC music have changed quite a lot since 2013. There was a period of time where we all felt super connected and were all living in the same city. Meeting up, hanging out going to parties together. Everything was less official and we were all in the same place. These days, things are transitioning to becoming more official in label terms and everyone has grown up and become more independent. Most of us live in different cities, I’m still super good friends with everyone there’s just more distance between us now.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Lipsitz

At times, the press suggested you were merely an avatar, or a front for male producers. That kind of attitude is appalling – how did it feel to be on the receiving end?

It was really frustrating for me, and I think had more of an impact on my self-esteem than I realised at the time. On the one hand its like great that you must think this is so good that it couldn’t have possibly come from me. But also what is it about me or my appearance, or what I’m doing (because at the time no one really knew much about me at all) that makes me seem like I’m incapable?

It really sucked cos a lot of the think pieces were written from a feminist perspective, but no one reached out to me to ask about my process and some that did have their own agenda and bypassed/twisted what I said to fit that. And that really took away my agency. I still sometimes feel like I have to prove myself.

It’s been over five years since ‘Pink And Blue’ went viral. Why does an album feel right for you at this time, and what makes 2019 the best opportunity to release it?

Sometimes I’m sad that it took so long for me to release my album because it did take a long time. But when I listen to it and I take a step back and look at what I made, including all the artworks, images, graphics, videos. I think no one will ever fully understand how much work and time I put into it other than me. And I’m so happy I took my time because it’s the best body of work I’ve ever made and the closest I’ve ever been to fully realising something I wanted to communicate. And somehow I made all of this when I was having a really tough time in my personal life.

I went through so much between 2016-2018, and 2019 I was coming out the other side and feeling so creative and powerful enough to finish everything off but also enough to feel able to get out on stage and start performing the album as well.

You work with different producers and collaborators on the record, how do you pick this cast? Do you have any tips on who you let into your life and art?

I’m still definitely learning about this, especially since now like I was saying earlier my main collaborators are all over the world. But I think at the start you should try things out, work with lots of friends, people you know who’s stuff you like and see what works and what fits. Then when you’ve worked that part out, if you’ve found someone or people that you really connect with on a creative level and personal level sometimes too is super important. Stick with them, look out for them support each other. For me it’s really important for me to have personal connections with the people I work with, it means I can be my self unashamedly and make my best work without feeling judged or inadequate”.

Before getting to a new interview, I want to come to a brief feature from FADER. It was in promotion of Diamond’s Affirmations. It arrived earlier in the year, at a moment that the PC Music label is starting to wind up. Perhaps one of her best cuts yet, Affirmations is one of the best songs of the year. It all bodes well for an album that is already being tipped to be among the finest of 2023:

“With the news that PC Music is winding down after 10 years of changing the pop landscape, each new release from the label is bound to come with a new poignancy. That’s certainly the case with “Affirmations,” the new song from Hannah Diamond. Extraterrestrial mall-pop built for blasting away melancholy, “Affirmations” makes the struggle for positivity sound like a battle worth fighting.”

Diamond said of the new song in a press statement: “This one particular day we were on Zoom and my carefully placed camera angle in my bedroom had accidentally shifted to reveal my ‘wall of self-esteem.’ It’s a wall of affirmations I put together when I was at a really low point and had a really negative view of myself. I decided that I would every day when I was struggling write five good things about myself and add them to my wall.

“Through the window of the Zoom, I became aware that my wall might look like a wall of madness,” she continued, “so I explained to Dave what it was. He was super supportive and after a long chat he said, ‘hey, “Affirmations” – great song title’”.

I am going to finish with a new interview from The Guardian. There will be more press with Diamond closer to October and Perfect Picture. Declaring her upcoming album as the pinnacle of Pop in 2023, there is a lot of faith and support around what Diamond is doing. She has caught the heart and mind of the nation. An artist who will be a worldwide sensation soon enough:

“Diamond debuted a decade ago with Pink and Blue, a dewy-eyed but slightly unnerving bubblegum single with a photoshoot to match. Back then, her music was deemed so uncanny – so pink and so feminine, especially in the experimental circles she was associated with – that many onlookers speculated whether Diamond was a model hired as the face of a project by one of her (male) friends in the then-nascent PC Music avant-pop collective. “A lot of my agency was taken away,” she says. “There were a lot of think-pieces about whether I was a real person.”

While writing Perfect Picture, Diamond started thinking about her early career in the context of “what it means to be a girl or woman in the music industry, who’s having to deal with these two sides of herself – a very pure me that my family and closest friends know, and this outward version of myself that’s almost a magnification of all those things, a very pristine pop version.”

She came to the realisation that these are twinned experiences: “To be a pop star is to always be performing and to be a girl is to always be performing,” especially in a world dominated by the internet, where “everyone thinks about how they are branding themselves; you’re never really off duty.” This is amplified under the gaze young women are subject to. “As a woman and a girl, I’ve always felt a lot of pressure to be perfect in some way – when I was young, I was scared to not be good,” she says. “And then you become an adult, and you become aware your body has sexual currency and start learning that there are all these contradictions that are impossible to live up to.”

So Diamond leaned into the girlishness that is both scorned and fetishised across culture. For Perfect Picture, she says, “I wanted to shed the ick that had developed in me for all this stuff” – pink, exaggerated femininity – “that I was really attracted to”. But Diamond remains “always aware of how much I’m contributing to …” – she air quotes – “‘the spectacle of girlhood.’ Femininity, the way it’s been commodified, marketed and corporatised, you could argue it has been pretty oppressive towards women. How much, by creating the images I make, feeds into that [even with] the intention of challenging something?”

PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Diamond/Carina Kehlet Schou

As a child in her home town of Norwich, Diamond was “very much a tracksuit kind of girl”; her “crazy creative” grandma’s house was an “explosion of pink,” which she found “all too much”. But by the time she moved to London for university, she was dressing “quite outrageously and really having fun with it,” then she found that in the capital, “the way I dressed affected the experience I had in the outside world.” She started dressing more plainly, to avoid being catcalled or kerb-crawled.

Things changed when she found a bright pink North Face puffer jacket for £10 in a Covent Garden secondhand store. The coat “almost felt like a safe way” to be typically feminine. Since then, she has been “learning to be myself in a confident way, and that it doesn’t have to feel limiting to express yourself in girlish ways.” Diamond wore the jacket on the cover of Pink and Blue; it’s since become one of her most iconic outfits. “Little did I know the impact that jacket would have,” she says. “A pink item had the ability to transform me into a musician, and make that a viable career, and transform my relationship with myself.”

Her single Poster Girl rejects the tyranny of perfection she had struggled under: “It’s the imperfections in moments / That make life so worth it.” It’s a surprising admission for an artist whose visual identity has always been defined by photos so airbrushed as to look surreal. Diamond’s early visuals – as well as the ones she made for other PC-affiliated artists, including QT, GFOTY, Sophie and Charli XCX – became hugely influential; their pristine, hyper-feminine aesthetic, once deemed outre, is now so commonplace in mainstream pop that, when Diamond released Poster Girl earlier this month, Swedish pop star Zara Larsson accused Diamond of copying her aesthetic before backtracking: “I didn’t know about her work … now I do, and she’s an icon”.

A truly wonderful artist who everyone should know about, I am so excited to see where Hannah Diamond heads next. Perfect Picture is certainly going to be one of the best albums of this year – no pressure on her! -, which will lead to new opportunities. Maybe some big exposure at huge festivals next year. With this loyal and very passionate fanbase behind her, there is no stopping this jewel in Pop’s modern crown. When it comes to Hannah Diamond, there is no doubt that she is set…