Offering sweet vocals and an equally honeyed melody, sonic96 is the dreamy new single from HÅN.

Photo: Laura Allard-Fleischl

Italian songwriter HÅN prepares to tackle on her biggest chapter to date as she announces news of her yet-to-be-titled debut album, which is set for release early next year via Sony Music. In anticipation, she shares an initial tease of what’s waiting in store with her newest single sonic96, a whimsical cut that will make as if you are floating on air. Dousing you with docile vocals and a gentle bedroom-pop melody, little resistance is offered in the track as to make it the easiest listening experience. The guitars feel sufficiently spaced out as to carve a cavernous space in the sound that will offer space for you to find your own feet within the track and form your own relation to it. With a softened edge to it, it provides a tender and bittersweet experience that will have you yearning for yet more of it.

Speaking more about the track, she shares:

Most people I know say that I have my head in the clouds. ‘sonic96’ (my year of birth is 1996) is a fantasy world where I take refuge, while the people around me remind me of reality. The track is about this, about how childish that is, and how I know that I’ll have to get out of it sooner or later. Living in this fantasy gives rise to communication problems between myself and others (I like it best when you don’t talk) which lead me to have to change (I changed my mouth) to adapt, but in this attempt I end up doing things the wrong way (cut my hair too short, drive a car the wrong way). Then there is this person (the clown on the artwork) who represents the threat of reality, and who hides matches under his jacket to wake me up from this fake safe place. This is the first track of the album I am releasing because it represents a sort of awakening, the turning point. I think I realized so many things during this year and so many things have changed in such a small amount of time. As always, I used my writing as a diary, or as a therapist, so the thoughts are sometimes scattered and confusing and based on random images, but then if you put everything together, you actually realize that they are expressing a precise feeling. I’m not a storyteller, but I want to communicate something I feel, and feelings are inaccurate, hard to define, and have blurred edges.