Hannah Amond always loved drawing. When she was young, she would use gigantic rolls of wallpaper to draw intricate schematics of interconnected rabbit warrens, and “each little rabbit had a room with sofas and all these things”. Then, in high school, she became obsessed with making photorealistic pencil illustrations, “to the point where it felt like the thing was jumping off the page”. Now 32, as Hannah Diamond, she is making the musical equivalent of photorealism: bright, synthetic, earnest songs, with her own high-gloss visuals. It’s some of the past decade’s most influential pop music and iconography, filtering through to the mainstream even though none of it has ever entered the UK charts.
Diamond debuted a decade ago with Pink and Blue, a dewy-eyed but slightly unnerving bubblegum single with a photoshoot to match. Back then, her music was deemed so uncanny – so pink and so feminine, especially in the experimental circles she was associated with – that many onlookers speculated whether Diamond was a model hired as the face of a project by one of her (male) friends in the then-nascent PC Music avant-pop collective. “A lot of my agency was taken away,” she says. “There were a lot of think-pieces about whether I was a real person.”
