Music / Hannah Diamond

I'm building my own world...

Hannah Amond, known as her Stage Name Hannah Diamond, is an English singer, songwriter, photographer, and visual artist. She is a starting member of producer A.G. Cook's label PC Music, releasing several singles produced by Cook such as "Pink and Blue," "Every Night," "Hi," and "Attachment," which helped the label gain attention in the early 2010s. She released her debut album, Reflections in 2019, and her sophomore album Perfect Picture was released in 2023. Her music is Synth-Pop, Hyper Pop, and a little bit of Glitch.

Her Signature Style, both in her music and her photography, is her focus on hyperreality, cuteness, and sleek, heavily-produced, synthetic qualities that just toe the line on becoming Uncanny Valley, combined with very sincere (almost primitive) lyricism. In addition to releasing music, she is also a photographer and visual designer, designing her own cover and promotional art, and occasionally provides artwork for other acts within the label. She considers both her musical and visual work to be interrelated, and treats the entirety of her persona as an "audiovisual experience." Imagine an A.I.-generated popstar—but with no A.I. involved, and you have Hannah Diamond.

Discography

• Soon I won't see you at all (EP, 2017)
• Reflections (2019)
• Reflections Instrumentals (2019)
• Reflections Remixes (EP, 2020)
• Perfect Picture (2023)

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Tropes:

• Break-Up Song:
  • Tracks like "Fade Away" and "Invisible." All of them are more bittersweet than outright sad as usually they find some kind of closure, such as in "Love Goes On" where — as the title implies — she finds solace in moving onto newer pastures.
• Color Motif: Purple and pink, the latter especially, which fits with her hyper-feminine image.
• Cover Version:
  • Of "Concrete Angel" by Gareth Emery and Christina Novelli, a Trance song from 2012.
  • Also of A.G. Cook's "Superstar."
• Helium Speech: Several of her songs have her voice pitched up just enough to sound a little bit unnatural, such as on "Every Night."
• High-Powered Career Woman: One of the things written on her wall on "Affirmations."
  I'm a business woman and my own CEO.
• Instrumentals: Instrumental versions of her debut album are available on her Bandcamp.
• Last Note Nightmare: The last thirty seconds of "Concrete Angel."
• Perfection Is Impossible: The theme of Perfect Picture. Also a bit of a meta-ironic commentary on her own career as a photographer, which has a lot of emphasis on sleek, "perfect"-looking visuals.
• Pink Is for Sissies: Subverted; Part of her ethos is taking often disrespected and dismissed aspects of pop culture (most things associated with girls), like girliness, kitschiness, plasticity, and saccharinity, and embraces them whole-heartedly.
• Plagiarism in Fiction: Accused of this by fans of Zara Larsson, as the single art for "Poster Girl" bore resemblance to the cover of Larsson's debut album Picture Perfect. (Both feature Diamond/Larsson sitting in pink bedrooms with posters of themselves on the wall). Diamond acknowledged the overlap of their work, but said that the similarities were a mere coincidence.
  "...There is no joy to be found in using someone else’s experience to create art and the last thing I’d ever want is to make Zara or any other artist feel like something had been taken from them."
• Poe's Law:
  • She has such a hyper-polished and synthetic feel to her, with occasionally borderline-saccharine lyrics to boot. Off the mic, however, she's repeatedly shown to be rather candid about both the synthetic and sincere elements to her persona, lending a ton of credence that it's all pretty much to be taken at face value.
    "I’ve personally had a lot of criticism for being ‘fake’ and things like that. All of the ways it’s been presented do allude to that but although PC music is a lot of different people, I very much consider myself my own self within that. I only contribute to one part of it. People are getting more used to who I am now and realising I am real or what my idea and my vision are for my project."
• Remix Album: One for Reflections, featuring remixes by Dylan Brady, Bladee, and umru.
• Silly Love Songs: Taken to a degree that is so sincere you might mistake it for satire. Funnily enough, despite the hyper-real and post-ironic approach the rest of the label is soaked in, Hannah admits that they actually come from a place of genuine sincerity and heart.
  "I am a total sap. With 'Hi,' the lyrics are so extreme. No one would admit to being that much of a loser that they'd write messages to people they fancy who don't reply and then get really sad about it, but that is actually me. I'm a melancholy person and I'm really really sensitive. Part of me wants romance to be about gooey stuff and not how romance is boiled down nowadays—booty size and money and cars. But I'm not really interested in masking who I am."
• Song Style Shift: A big one on "Concrete Angel."
• Spiritual Antithesis: To another PC Music affiliate, GFOTY. While Hannah Diamond warmly embraces kitschiness, girliness, and plasticity with full earnesty, GFOTY is an abrasive Satire of pop music and American culture, poking at the hollowness of it through an ironic Hard-Drinking Party Girl character. Hannah Diamond's beats are sugary sweet, while GFOTY's are bizarre and occasionally abrasive, which is also ironic since a good portion of both of their music was produced by the same person: A.G. Cook.
• Spoken Word in Music: A brief vocal snippet separates the two halves of "Concrete Angel."
  And there was a light around me, and I had this incredible sense of peace, that just came over me... and I knew, I knew, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel.
• Uncanny Valley: Not nearly as much as, say, SOPHIE, but she certainly dances close to it, especially in her lyrics and vocal delivery.