Hannah Diamond

Like many of the other artists affiliated with the collective and label PC Music, British singer/songwriter/photographer Hannah Diamond’s calculated yet guileless songs exemplify what makes pop music tick. The high-concept style of her music — which she introduced with 2013′s “Pink and Blue” — is its substance: Even though her vocals are highly processed, there’s an almost childlike simplicity to her delivery and lyrics, and while the synths and beats that back her evoke everything from early-2000s Euro-dance to happy hardcore to grime to J-pop and K-pop, they don’t sound exactly like anything that came before. Though the PC Music aesthetic was often described as polarizing, Diamond scored a Billboard-charting hit with 2014′s fluorescent single “Every Night” and added more melancholy depth to her sound on 2019′s full-length Reflections.
Born Hannah Amond, Diamond established herself as a visual artist and photographer before embarking on her music career. Having studied fashion communication and styling, and influenced by the colorful, hyperreal work of photographers such as David LaChapelle and Nick Knight, she handled post-production on photo shoots for various fashion magazines (later, she shaped the glossy look of PC Music as well as its sound). After Diamond met GFOTY (short for Girlfriend of the Year, aka Polly-Louisa Salmon) through a friend in 2012, GFOTY introduced her to producer A.G. Cook. At the time, Cook was founding the collective and label PC Music, and he and Diamond soon started recording songs together. Diamond’s first single for the label, “Pink and Blue,” appeared in October 2013 and helped define PC Music’s brightly lit hyper-pop.
Juggling her careers in fashion and music meant that Diamond concentrated on releasing singles for most of the 2010s. Along with appearing on Cook’s “Keri Baby” in January 2014, she also issued “Attachment” that April and “Every Night” in November. The latter became a streaming hit and ultimately reached number 28 on the Billboard Emerging Artists chart. A year later, Diamond returned with “Hi,” and began work on her debut album not long after. Her 2016 projects included “Paradise,” a collaboration with Charli XCX that appeared on XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP, and the single “Make Believe,” which featured production by Cook and easyFun. Late in 2017, Diamond issued the mixtape Soon I Won’t See You at All.
Several other tracks, including the Danny L. Harle team-up “Part of Me,” led up to the November 2019 release of Diamond’s first full-length, Reflections. Produced once again by Cook, the album balanced previously released and new tracks as well as typically cheerful and more somber-sounding songs. ~ Heather Phares & Liam Martin