Heard

Two years on from her debut album, 2023’s acclaimed ‘Aperture’, life is looking really different for Hannah Jadagu. In the time since the record’s release, the Texas-raised, New York-based alt-pop star has fallen in love, graduated from college and gone on her first headline tour across Europe. A lot of these experiences have shaped her introspective, synth-driven second album ‘Describe’, which arrives today.

The distance created by touring another continent made Jadagu “more cognizant of my own being and that relationship that I have with another person and how my work and my lifestyle can affect that in very real ways”, she tells NME over video call from her New York apartment. That helped inform the “authentic and vulnerable” songs on the album, such as ‘More’, where she sings: “I’ve been 5,000 miles away, why does 3,000 feel like more?”

At the same time, touring and “playing the guitar every day” also coloured the way Jadagu approached the creative process for ‘Describe’ when it started back in the summer of 2023. “I was trying to write new songs and trying to figure out the direction for my new record, I found that the guitar for me was not amplifying my voice in the way that I needed it to,” she says. “It wasn’t helping me discover new melodies that I could sing and stuff like that.

“So, I was like, ‘Let me just try to play stuff on a MIDI keyboard’. And then, a year later, I took it to my producers and we really amped it up,” she continues. Although that approach was “so freeing for what I was writing at the time”, the guitar is still never too far from her side: “On the record, there’s a lot of songs with guitar, but it functions more as accompaniment rather than the strong rhythm-heavy thing that moves it along.”

The title track ‘Describe’ is such an arresting opener. It really sets the stage for an album that is sonically wider and emotionally deeper. Why did you think that this song was the right one to not only open the album, but to name it after?

“When I first sat down to try making a new record, ‘Describe’ was the first thing that I made, and that was in the summer of 2023. So this is post-‘Aperture’ release, and ‘Describe’ came so naturally to me. I found myself playing around with new sounds, new themes lyrically, and I was just captivated by the sonic landscape of what I was doing, but there was no album that came of that.

“It took a full year, until the summer of 2024, where I felt like every song that I kept writing was leading me to an album, and it was making me realise that in all these songs, I’m literally trying to just describe the ways in which I was feeling and the experiences that I was having. ‘Describe’ is where it all started, and it kept being a through line to all of the lyrics and all of the sounds, and just trying to figure out what I wanted to say. I don’t know if I will ever fully describe or articulate things in the way that I hope to, but I’m always trying.”

I love how ‘Describe’ really primes the listener to expect the unexpected on this album, from the electronica of ‘More’ to the devastating piano moment on ‘Couldn’t Call’ or even a return to a more guitar-driven sound on ‘Doing Now’.

“That’s why I made ‘Describe’ the first track on the record. It prepares people to be like, ‘Wait, what?’ There’s so much that even happens in that song alone. There’s so much of a journey that it takes with the strings and with the senses and with the bare vocal. There’s a lot going on, and that was definitely the point, to say, ‘Hey, this record is not gonna be whatever the last record was, and that’s OK, but you’re in store for some really interesting sounds and somewhat of a progression [from the last album].’”

With this combination of synths and guitars on the record, it feels like there are a lot of hidden layers within layers across the album that make it come to life.

“I always say there’s a lot of things in there that are felt but not heard. Some people might call that a little maximalist. On ‘Normal Today’, there’s probably about 200 stems, and it’s a lot, and I kinda laugh at that because maybe I was doing too much. But sometimes you can create little harmonics out of the meshing of things, and sometimes that can create a really unique feeling.

“But we also strip it down a bit, like on ‘Doing Now’ or ‘Gimme Time’. There are moments where it is just back to the core timelessness of a Michael Jackson song – not to compare myself to Michael Jackson, but I like playing with that and going in and out of the analogue and the modern and just trying to find a balance between it. That’s why I’m very influenced by people like FKA twigs or Rosalía because they do that extremely well and at the highest level.”

Was tracklisting something that was really important to you on this album?

“There was major intent behind the tracklisting. That’s what kept me from finishing the record or turning it in, because I kept being like, ‘Wait, no. Should I put this song right there? This song over there?’ [I wanted this album to] document what it’s like to be very human and to be in a relationship and to be navigating things when you’re 21. And I wanted to show chaos, but tell a loose story through that.

“Do I make the right choices [when tracklisting]? Who can say? That’s for the listener [to decide]. But I do think about these things, and I really care about stuff like tracklisting and how the listener can make sense of the record for themselves and how they can interpret it for themselves. And that’s always something I’m keeping in the back of my mind when I’m making an album. And that’s why I love to make an album, ’cause you get to tell a story.”

You recorded your first EP, 2021’s ‘What Is Going On?’, entirely on your iPhone 7. A lot has changed since, but how has your creative process evolved?

“The way that I think it’s similar is that a lot of the songs start in my room. It starts with just me, the MIDI keyboard and all the stuff I have at my disposal – which isn’t that much. I’ve got speakers, I’ve got a Scarlett, a keyboard, and I’ve got a guitar. I start with somewhat of a melody and gibberish, and then I start to notice certain words, and then I try to focus on a theme, focus on a message, and then I build the track around it.

“But then there’s songs like ‘Gimme Time’, where that was the first time I actually wrote a composition with somebody else [album co-producer Sora Lopez]. And then once we played that stuff together and just started adding layers, then I came up with the lyrics, freestyled a lot of that. Went back, hashed it out, and then we finished it. So it’s changed in some ways, where I’m open to collaborating from the beginning of a song – but it’s still very tight-knit, not too many cooks in the kitchen.

“A lot of times I’ll keep the first [or] second thing I do, which I’ve always done since I started making music when I was like 14. Once I try to workshop and go back and redo something, I’ve found that’s not really my vibe. So that’s something that I still do and I’ve always done, and I probably will always do.

“I’ve gotten a lot better about not rushing things, but maybe Sora would say differently. I don’t like spending a long time making stuff [laughs], because I feel like if you don’t got it, you don’t got it. Some people are different. Some people spend six years making an album and that’s cool. For me, the journey that I’m at in these two years is not the same that I’m gonna be at two years later.”

What’s on your mind these days and how do you think that might come through in your future music?

“These days, I’m trying to make the next record. I’m just very fortunate, because after I graduated school, I’ve been able to do music full-time. So, now I’m just trying to figure out the next step in what I wanna say next and what that looks like.”

“I’m living a very peaceful life now, trying to figure out my routine outside of being a student. And I’m very much in love now. Just enjoying life and trying to see what comes from it. I’m taking my time with it, and there’s not even a single song done, but that’s kind of what I’m doing. It’s just I’m always trying to navigate, always trying to see how I can be better and always trying to see, you know, what else it is that I have to say.”

Hannah Jadagu’s new album ‘Describe’ is out now via Sub Pop.