Hannah Diamond - Reflections

The Guardian 80

(PC Music)
On these melancholy bangers, the PC Music singer uses nursery rhyme-like melodies and a girlish sing-song delivery to essay the pain of being lovelorn and vulnerable

Here’s an affecting companion piece to Caroline Polachek’s recently acclaimed Pang: another breakup album with production handled by one of the PC Music collective, who rescue trance-pop sonics from the tyranny of good taste. Polachek’s record featured work by Danny L Harle, while Diamond’s is produced by AG Cook. Where Polachek is erudite and poetic, Diamond is prosaic; where Polachek’s vocals are astonishingly skilful, swooping into high registers, Diamond’s are unremarkably ordinary.

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Fri Nov 22 10:30:22 GMT 2019

The Guardian 80

(PC Music)

The press release for Hannah Diamond’s debut album hammers home the fact that the 28-year-old from Norwich is a real person. As the early figurehead for gonzo collective PC Music’s synthetic, hyper-real take on pop music, Diamond was caught in a wider conversation surrounding notions of authenticity, with her early singles dismissed as two-dimensional or, worse, the work of male geniuses using her as an avatar. Reflections, a gloriously overwrought breakup album, proves there’s a beating heart beneath Diamond’s self-aware, Photoshopped exterior.

Over 10 off-kilter songs, Diamond, whose deadpan, heavily tweaked vocals lend every word a sort of icy detachment, details the stages of a relationship ending, from catching a new flirtation on OTT hyper-ballad Invisible (“do you wish I wasn’t even there sometimes?”), to unpicking the moment of full implosion on the tactile Never Again.

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Sun Dec 01 15:00:07 GMT 2019

Pitchfork 62

Heavy on vocal processing and maximalist A. G. Cook production, the PC Music star’s first full-length can’t help feeling a little anticlimactic.

Mon Dec 02 06:00:00 GMT 2019