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.”
The Hannah Diamond sitting with me in the courtyard of Somerset House in London – where she has been curating an immersive musical experience for a forthcoming exhibition about the cultural phenomenon of cuteness – is certainly real; her all-black outfit is accented, naturally, by pink tights and long, luminous pink hair. Sprightly and warm, a glint of mischief occasionally rising to her eye, she explains the steady but significant transformation she has undergone in the past few years – the period of “rebuilding my self-esteem and working out who I am” that’s led to Perfect Picture, her dazzling second album.
Produced by David Gamson of Scritti Politti, one of PC Music’s earliest inspirations, Perfect Picture is one of the best British pop albums of the year; songs such as No FX, Lip Sync and Impossible fret about finding human connection in a digitally mediated world, the perfect sheen of Gamson’s production distilling the thrill of 2010s pop to a potent concentrate.
While writing Perfect Picture, Diamond started thinking about her early career in the context of “what it means to be a girl or woman in the music industry, who’s having to deal with these two sides of herself – a very pure me that my family and closest friends know, and this outward version of myself that’s almost a magnification of all those things, a very pristine pop version.”
She came to the realisation that these are twinned experiences: “To be a pop star is to always be performing and to be a girl is to always be performing,” especially in a world dominated by the internet, where “everyone thinks about how they are branding themselves; you’re never really off duty.” This is amplified under the gaze young women are subject to. “As a woman and a girl, I’ve always felt a lot of pressure to be perfect in some way – when I was young, I was scared to not be good,” she says. “And then you become an adult, and you become aware your body has sexual currency and start learning that there are all these contradictions that are impossible to live up to.”
So Diamond leaned into the girlishness that is both scorned and fetishised across culture. For Perfect Picture, she says, “I wanted to shed the ick that had developed in me for all this stuff” – pink, exaggerated femininity – “that I was really attracted to”. But Diamond remains “always aware of how much I’m contributing to …” – she air quotes – “‘the spectacle of girlhood.’ Femininity, the way it’s been commodified, marketed and corporatised, you could argue it has been pretty oppressive towards women. How much, by creating the images I make, feeds into that [even with] the intention of challenging something?”
As a child in her home town of Norwich, Diamond was “very much a tracksuit kind of girl”; her “crazy creative” grandma’s house was an “explosion of pink,” which she found “all too much”. But by the time she moved to London for university, she was dressing “quite outrageously and really having fun with it,” then she found that in the capital, “the way I dressed affected the experience I had in the outside world.” She started dressing more plainly, to avoid being catcalled or kerb-crawled.
Things changed when she found a bright pink North Face puffer jacket for £10 in a Covent Garden secondhand store. The coat “almost felt like a safe way” to be typically feminine. Since then, she has been “learning to be myself in a confident way, and that it doesn’t have to feel limiting to express yourself in girlish ways.” Diamond wore the jacket on the cover of Pink and Blue; it’s since become one of her most iconic outfits. “Little did I know the impact that jacket would have,” she says. “A pink item had the ability to transform me into a musician, and make that a viable career, and transform my relationship with myself.”
Her single Poster Girl rejects the tyranny of perfection she had struggled under: “It’s the imperfections in moments / That make life so worth it.” It’s a surprising admission for an artist whose visual identity has always been defined by photos so airbrushed as to look surreal. Diamond’s early visuals – as well as the ones she made for other PC-affiliated artists, including QT, GFOTY, Sophie and Charli XCX – became hugely influential; their pristine, hyper-feminine aesthetic, once deemed outre, is now so commonplace in mainstream pop that, when Diamond released Poster Girl earlier this month, Swedish pop star Zara Larsson accused Diamond of copying her aesthetic before backtracking: “I didn’t know about her work … now I do, and she’s an icon.”
Although the Larsson drama occurs weeks after Diamond and I speak, she does acknowledge how proud she is of how her music and visual art has permeated culture so deeply – even without many knowing it. A whole new genre, hyperpop, blossomed as a result of her and PC Music’s work, and at least in hip and underground circles, the collective did much to change snobbish mindsets about pop and its potential. “I find it amazing that me and my friends could make this work together that’s inspired so many people, because it’s like, who gets to do that? That’s rare,” she says. “We had this kind of punk idea that, OK, you’re on a shoestring budget, but you can make something super high-level just by yourself. We were thinking as big as possible, not worrying about how we’d do it, but just giving it a shot.”
The visuals for Perfect Picture are a tiny bit less pristine, because “I wanted everything to feel more real – I’m so tired of all the NFT, 3D, composite-background stuff. It’s been so exhausted,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to feel like it was in that world, whereas my previous work, especially for [debut album] Reflections, was very fantasy-based.”
Diamond describes Reflections, released in 2019, as “a little bit reactionary”. After being heavily criticised for her aesthetic for so long, she toned things down for her first album, adopting a cooler colour palette and leaning into icy trance-pop and electronica. Part of that was due to “the pain and real heartbreak I was going through,” but she also felt as if she “needed to prove to everyone that I am multidimensional”.
One of the biggest changes in Diamond’s sound on Perfect Picture is that she often sounds totally joyous, in contrast to earlier songs that were often shot through with melancholy. “I felt very disempowered back then, for a bunch of reasons – where I was at in my life, the relationships I had,” she says. “Now I feel quite strong, and happy and confident in the work that I’m making. I believe in myself in a way that I didn’t know was possible.”
Perfect Picture is a full-circle moment for Diamond, and for PC Music, who have decided to cease releasing new music this year, after a decade of activity. Diamond was one of the collective’s first, and most distinctive, artists; Perfect Picture will be one of PC’s last releases, produced by one of the collective’s key influences. The end “does feel sad,” but Diamond differentiates the label from “PC Music the collective, which is not going to go anywhere in my mind. We’ve heavily influenced and inspired each other to make our best work. Really good friends are hard to find, and the fact that I’ve been able to find this group of people with a shared ethos is the best gift I could have ever wanted.”
Buoyed up by their support, Diamond has made it past all the scrutiny, stress and striving for an impossible ideal. The cover of Perfect Picture, with Diamond in a ballerina outfit, pays homage to one of the only photos her family has of her grandma as a girl, the grandma whose pink house once overwhelmed her so much. “When I was thinking about what a perfect picture is, I really think [that photo] is it,” she says. “She struggled with the idea that she wasn’t good enough or perfect enough – but to me she’s so fucking iconic.”
• Perfect Picture is released 6 October on PC Music. Cute is at Somerset House from 25 January to 4 April
