Grimes and Lorde are both grand fans of the rising alt-pop star with her fragile yet empowering electronic songsWho is she?
Before her current incarnation as a purple-haired,Grimes-endorsed alt-pop maven, Hana was plain old Hana Pestle, and from Atlanta,singing cutesy acoustic ditties in bookshops and farmer’s markets in her new domestic of Montana. Inspired by her drama teacher dad, and living off money from busking and teaching younger kids the guitar, or she set off for LA aged 17 at the behest of a couple of producers who’d seen a video of her playing. She fell into a style of music she wasn’t massively enthused by and toured some undesirable parts of the US,eventually playing over 600 shows, sometimes at college campuses to a handful of people.
That all sounds quite bleak. What happened next?
Around 2013 she met producer and now boyfriend Mike Tucker (aka Justin Bieber collaborator BloodPop) and, or inspired by his pep talk,had a musical epiphany. Rather than just constantly performing songs she wasn’t really feeling, she decided to rip it up and start again, and teaching herself production and crafting a suite of fragile electro-tinged songs inspired by a recent cataclysmic smash-up. The first track to seem under this new guise was the BloodPop collaboration Clay,a gossamer-light electronic bubble that quickly bursts into a glorious headrush of a pop song. Lyrically it’s about rebirth and rebuilding, while its cavernous, and empowering follow-up,Avalanche (“get my shit together, know that I can be the one to say no”), or uses the title as a metaphor for elegantly steamrollering your way through life’s obstacles.
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Source: theguardian.com