I sometimes spend months listening to music with worn out hardware before finally, begrudgingly replacing it. I’m well accustomed to auxiliary cables and earbuds that cut out a left or right channel or hem their audio with static unless positioned in just the right manner, each internal wire lined up perfectly. So, however aggravating, it’s not out of the ordinary to find myself interrupted, tediously straightening out my tangled aux cord and twisting its end around in its socket, during my first listen of PC Music pop star Hannah Diamond’s 2017 mix Soon I Won’t See You at All. This sort of banal technical breakdown can feel like a betrayal in our age of seemingly uninhibited connectivity and instant gratification. When I’m fussing to return Diamond’s voice to my ears with one hand, trying to keep the other on the steering wheel and my eye on the road, I’m reminded of the disjuncture between where I am and where was promised. Music can be immersive — transcendent, even — but it’s ultimately only as effective as its means of delivery allow, and the kinked Walmart cable plugged into my 2000 Chevy feels woefully insufficient in carrying me away from Tampa traffic into Diamond and producer A. G. Cook’s icy digital soundscapes.

But really, even the most cutting edge tech is susceptible to this kind of failure. The development of communications technology in the 21st century has in one regard been a push toward seamlessness — faithful replication in digital media of immediate, fleshy experience — such that the move from live to surround sound, from firsthand vision to high definition, from IRL to URL, implies no loss. But as digital media are integrated ever more ubiquitously into our lives, as we put more and more faith into the authenticity of their connections, it has become so painfully obvious as to be trite: something has been lost, after all. Each of us are enabled to connect to hundreds or thousands of people instantly, but the messages we receive back are devoid of the infinitesimal tonal affectations, gestures, and physical exchanges that constitute our embodied interactions. We take for granted (because we do it too) that these messages may be carefully revised to make a certain impression. Over and over again, we agonize to receive a response to a vulnerable message, or get a reply that leaves us longing for something more. This drama — desperate and stubborn hope for real, authentic connection, dashed again and again by the incapacity of our virtual worlds to sustain it — is at the heart of Hannah Diamond’s work, and Soon I Won’t See You At All is its culmination.

An accompanying playlist of Hannah Diamond’s work discussed in this essay.

From the very beginning of Diamond’s output with PC Music — i.e. her “waiting for so-o-o-o-o long,” wondering “why don’t you hit me up?” in 2013’s “Pink and Blue” — she’s played on the image of a girl alone in her room, dreaming of something more. But in her group of early 2014 releases, the mark of digital mediation on her longing begins to take center stage. In A. G. Cook’s “Keri Baby,” Diamond assumes the role of a virtual avatar a la Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku, “kinda real, kinda (oooh),” unclear on the line between virtual reality and the “real” thing, but ultimately wishing to be more than just “an MP3.” And in “Attachment,” Diamond attempts to accept her lover’s image on her screen as the only way they will be “together forever,” convincing herself that, now that she’s on her own, the attachment has become more real between them, and the picture saved on her phone allows her to see her partner “clearly.”

Diamond’s body of work seems to oscillate between transcendent affirmation of our interconnectivity, and at the opposite extreme, depths of isolated confusion.

Born in 1991, Hannah Diamond came of age alongside flip phones, Myspace, and AIM. Her preoccupation with the digital is unsurprising, but in the premier of her web series, HDTV, she makes clear that, as she sees it, “the main thing” her lyrics are about is love, “when you first really start liking someone…all those kind of mixed emotions that you’re going through, but then you kind of find out that they maybe don’t quite feel the same way as you.” It’s this question of uncertain romantic connection, filtered through the online spaces that, for Diamond, “can often feel really isolating,” that she begins to crystallize with her 2015 single and debut music video, “Hi.” As Diamond pines, “I can imagine / you looking deep into my eyes / I know that you’re on the other side,” she looks outward, her gaze mediated by windows, mirrors, hyperactive desktops, billboards, and camera lenses, wondering “are you with me, is it real?” Diamond writes that “Hi” is about “interacting with people who only show small segments of their life, and the dilemmas around authenticity that this presents.” Behind all of her daydreams, the “real” Diamond lies alone in her bedroom “wasting time” online, wishing to cut through all the screens and “just meet at a party,” where sharing space with someone she loves might mean “great chemistry,” and an authentic connection.

But Diamond never gives up hope, and her body of work as a whole seems to oscillate between transcendent affirmation of our interconnectivity — like in “Make Believe,” where having her lover’s “face in a book,” means she’ll “never be lonely” — and at the opposite extreme, depths of isolated confusion — as in “Fade Away,” where she desponds “I always thought I’d be / The picture saved on your screen / Now it’s of something else / What does that even mean?” In “Hi,” as well, Diamond struggles to decipher the minefield of online signification, entreating, “You say you’re as real as it gets; what do you mean?”