Hannah Bahng stands at the shoreline, her bare feet sinking into wet sand. There's salt in the air and brine on her sun-kissed skin. She takes it all in. The sea is a timeless muse; for Hannah, it's a liminality, the ebb and flow between the familiar and the vast unknown. It’s azure waves crashing against the cliffs at Bronte Beach just 17 or so miles from the Sydney suburb where she grew up. It's the endless horizon that makes her feel both small and at peace with her own insignificance. And it's the excitement that washes over her when she ventures too far. There's so much beauty in its immense ambiguity.
"So many people are afraid of the ocean, but I think there's something so intriguing about it," she tells Teen Vogue over iced chai and matcha soda in a Los Angeles coffee shop in April, our third conversation for this piece in six months. "There's so much to be discovered." The ocean is unknowable, a simple truth that speaks to a 19-year-old on the brink of self-discovery, ready to dive headfirst into uncharted waters with the release of her debut single, "perfect blues."
On the surface, Hannah doesn't appear to take herself too seriously. She comes across as funny and slightly irreverent — a half-ironic, half-earnest product of her generation, someone who clearly spent her formative years watching Adventure Time and the entire Emma Chamberlain canon. It's what has endeared her to millions of followers on social media. Yet her music offers a glimpse inside the restless mind of someone who's still figuring themselves out. There's an almost meditative quality to "perfect blues," a bright summer track with a steady undertow of existentialism. It opens with breezy ukulele chords and Hannah's velvety vocals before swelling into a rapturous plea: "Oh I pray to make new waves," she sings. Or perhaps it's more a manifestation of things to come.
It's not that Hannah hides behind her humor, but rather that the only way she feels comfortable expressing vulnerability is through her art. "I know it's a tale as old as time, but music is such an outlet for me," she says. We're sitting outside at Coffee MCO, one of Hannah's favorite cafes in Los Angeles, a city she's become quite familiar with over the past 18 months as she's been flying back and forth from Sydney to LA to lay down tracks for her debut project with producer Andrew Luce (Iann Dior, Role Model, Lil Nas X). She's been writing and recording inside of his home studio. Not really a coffee drinker, she orders an iced chai — "I'm in my iced chai phase," she adds, her blue hair now a faded gray — and she's curious enough about my carbonated matcha that I offer her a sip, to which she happily accepts. A few seconds later, her face sours only to concede, "I don't know about that."
Talking to Hannah is like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel where each sentence is a journey in itself. Her thoughts tend to meander, and she's the kind of person who figures it out as she goes. She calls "perfect blues" her "finding myself moment." The song, she says, is about "coming to terms with the choice that I've made…of whether I want to drown or swim." She sings of "swimming metaphorically" through her thoughts; will she succumb to the fear of the unknown or will she embrace it? "When I wrote it I had a lot of anxiety about whether I was making the right choice [about my future]," she says. "It really helped me process the emotions I was feeling. It's a perfect representation of who I am and who I was when I wrote that song."
When Hannah initially told me she was working on her music over brunch in New York last fall, I wasn't exactly surprised. If you're one of her 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, then you've most likely seen some of the vocal covers she uploads to her channel, which is predominantly an archive of chaotic vlogs and random musings. Or maybe you watched the Q&A in which she confessed that a past version of her wanted to be a K-pop idol (more on that later). There's also the fact that she comes from a musically gifted family (more on that later, too), and she's always wanted to pursue a career in the arts. So for Hannah, it was never a question of if but when.
"I can't think of a specific time when music became a part of my life because I feel like it's always been a part of my life," she says. She remembers morning drives with her mom, listening to Air Supply on 95.3, a local radio station that played "iconic jams."
In the middle of February, she invites me to her childhood home — which is to say it's also her home when she's not in Los Angeles or New York or Paris or Tokyo, or any of the other cities she's been traveling to in recent months. She lives on a plain street lined with houses in a neighborhood not too far from Strathfield, an inner-West Sydney suburb known for its bustling Koreatown. It's a scorching summer day, and Hannah pours two cold glasses of her favorite lemon tea and puts them on the coffee table in the living room. I've already met the entire family within a minute of my arrival: her mother, who Hannah credits for her love of singing and performing; her father, who warmly offers me a pair of house slippers; her younger brother, who quickly makes his way up the stairs to his room; and her dog, Berry, a sweet Cavalier King Charles Spaniel she not-so-jokingly refers to as the "most famous member of the family."
The living room looks lovingly lived in. There are photos everywhere — photos framed on side tables, photos on the entertainment unit, and photos neatly categorized by child in albums on bookshelves. Her mom collects snow globes, and they're placed atop the piano where Hannah wrote many of the songs on her album. Below the television, Hannah's gold YouTube play button, an award given to creators who reach one million subscribers, sits next to a red carpet photo of her older brother, Chris, also known as Bang Chan, the leader of K-pop group Stray Kids. He lives in Seoul, but there are pieces of him throughout the house. Hannah practices ballet and contemporary dance in an area off the kitchen that used to be the garage. Her father renovated it, turning it into a workout room that's also a place to keep cherished family mementos, including rows of Stray Kids albums and merchandise. Hannah asked her dad to install curtains so she could dance without staring at her brother's likeness in the mirror.
Related: Bang Chan, Dynamic Leader of Stray Kids, Is Just Enjoying It All
As a child, Hannah loved to be the center of attention (and still does, she points out). She describes her parents as doting, but they didn't suffocate her; they gave her the space to figure things out for herself. They taught her how to live in the present, to "make sure [not to] fret so much over the future or the past — enjoy where you're at." That's easier said than done, especially when everyone around you seems to have figured out their paths. She played the flute in primary school and started a love-hate relationship with the piano. "My mom made me take piano lessons, and I remember hating it," she says. She found her passion for it again in high school when she started getting serious about singing. Naturally, she picked up the guitar, too.
It was at the same time in Year 7 that Hannah got really into K-pop. She'd known of iconic groups like Miss A and BIGBANG, but it wasn't until her teenage years that a deeper interest developed. The attention-seeker in her was drawn to the idea of being center stage, performing her heart out for thousands of fans. "That's when my goal to become an idol started," she says. Over the course of the next five years, she thought of little else. She took dance lessons, and singing lessons, and filmed audition tapes for Korean agencies. "I was convinced, like, 'Nothing will stop me. If I don't do this, then there's nothing else.' I was so desperate for it."
There aren't a lot of people who would willingly admit to feeling desperate for something. The truth is that desperation fuels creativity, and behind every success story there's someone who, at some point in time, was a little desperate. For Hannah, it's been her driving force.
"To be honest, I was completely desperate," she says. She auditioned twice for the Newtown High School of Performing Arts, her older brother's alma mater, and where her younger brother is currently enrolled. She first auditioned for the dance department and "spent like a year really grinding for that." She didn't make it. Then she had "an emotional breakdown in the car" about playing the guitar the day of her music audition. "I remember singing 'Edelweiss' without the guitar and then going into 'The Lazy Song' by Bruno Mars," she recalls, before adding, "Weird choice, but it's okay." She was crushed when she didn't get in. But she didn't let herself wallow in self-pity.
"If I want something, I will try my hardest to get it. I'm not going to give up halfway," she says. “So that's when I thought, 'I am going to succeed no matter what.' Honestly out of spite.”
She put all of her energy into becoming an idol. And while she didn't make the decision because of her brother, she at least knew that it was possible for her. "At that point, he hadn't even debuted or anything," she says. "But I knew the concept of being a trainee at a big company existed. It felt more attainable to me than becoming a Hollywood pop star. That never crossed my mind at all." She fixated on this singular goal, practicing every day. "I auditioned for JYP three times," she laughs.
Then the pandemic happened, and it made Hannah rethink the kind of artist she wanted to be. You could say that 2021 was her year of, like, realizing stuff. "I had this whole conversation with myself: 'It's not like I'm bad at any of the things I'm doing, but it's just not working.' And then I was like, you know, maybe this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing right now." So she tried a different approach. She picked up her camera, taught herself how to edit, and launched her YouTube channel in September 2021. Learning a thing or two from faves like Troye Sivan and Conan Gray, the end goal was always music. "I knew that in this day and age, you have to have that [online] presence."
YouTube became a creative outlet for her to express herself in new ways. For the first time, she was letting people see the real Hannah — goofy, unserious, and relatably cool — and not just some idea of who they thought she was. "At the start, I was very worried that my entire identity would be an idol's sibling… I was paranoid that people only liked me because I had the same DNA as [Chris]. But I've come to realize they like me and they like what I do." Of course, she's not so naive to think that there aren't people who watch her videos because of her brother. "At the end of the day, if they're following me for a different motive," she smiles, "they're still watching my stuff." At the same time, she knows she wouldn't be here without his support. "He just wants me to do what I want to do."
While filming and editing content for her channel, she began quietly working on her own music. There's no pop star apparatus around her; no team of publicists and agents and stylists to curate her image and make decisions. It's just her and her manager, a twentysomething with enough business savvy and resourcefulness to power an entire boardroom of label execs. Together, they created Bahng Entertainment. They do everything themselves, from finding a videographer on TikTok to reaching out to her producer in LA to outlining an entire distribution plan for Hannah's debut project. Everything from the album artwork to the physical structure, down to what paper it's made out of, is Hannah's decision. She's designing her own merch and choreographing her own performances. And they're funding it all themselves, too. Everything Hannah's made from YouTube and brand sponsorships gets poured back into her music.
Being an independent artist wasn't the original plan, but at this point in her career, Hannah can't see herself not being 100 percent involved in her art, not being the one writing her music, playing her chords, directing her music videos, and executing her vision. "I'm very grateful to be in a position where I have complete creative control over everything."
She shows me the pages of her journal, filled with lyrics and storyboards she drew herself. She commits her thoughts to paper as she sees them in her head — nonlinear and fluid. She never erases ideas, choosing instead to cross them out. Words meander around the page in spirals and couplets. She drew an image of "perfect blues" before she wrote a single lyric. It was her in the middle of the ocean, feeling so small and insignificant and yet feeling so empowered by that realization. "It's the most fun thing to see storyboards that I've written come to life through a music video or hearing melodies and lyrics and music that I've written and just recorded on my phone come to life as actual songs with substance." As soon as her mindset switched from idol to artist, the music just flowed out of her. She had never even written a full song until 2021. Now, she writes and composes every song, sending them to her producer Andrew as fully-formed ideas. "I started seeing so much growth," she says. “I was a lot happier. And I wasn't constantly beating myself down for thinking I was sh*t.”
Her B-side single, "OLeander," is smokier and more atmospheric. It illustrates her raw talent for crafting distinctive melodies and the intimacy of her lyricism. She doesn't want to limit herself to one genre. Months later at Coffee MCO, she plays me a few unmastered demos and potential album cuts. There's a macabre track inspired by experiencing horrible flight turbulence while listening to a Frank Ocean song; a bedroom pop dance song; and a trippy piano ballad. "What I can't express in real life, it all comes out through my music," she says. It's also helped her better understand herself and her emotional responses to things. "Even speaking about it now I'm having a weird epiphany," she adds. "I'm reaching a new level of enlightenment. I learn new things about myself every day."
She shows me a rough cut of the music video for "perfect blues." It was filmed in the Bahamas with a tiny crew, including her, her manager, and her videographer from Texas. They used any natural resources they could find on the beach. Hannah calls it "balling on a budget." In the video, she floats on a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean — free sea debris — before diving off it and into the recondite waters. It's a brief scene that says so much about Hannah: how she learned to dive from her father, who owned a local swim club where she'd often do her homework after school; her complete willingness to try new things and challenge herself, even if it means getting hurt in the process (she has the physical and emotional scars to show for it); and the freedom that comes from making her own waves.
Looking ahead, she has a lot to look forward to. A day after our cafe meetup in Los Angeles, Hannah met with a major label. They wanted to sign her and offered her a deal on the spot. She decided she wanted to continue releasing her music independently. She wants to see how far she can swim on her own. Who knows, maybe she'll even start to fly.
"I'm a big believer in experiencing life while you have the chance," she says. "There's so much I want to do. I want to sky jump… wait, sky jump?" No, that's not right. An airy laugh escapes. "Skydive! I want to skydive. Why does sky jump sound so cool?" She takes a moment to think. “I need to write that down.”
