Meet the multi-instrumentalist and vocal powerhouse tipped for great things.
Greta Van Fleet’s alcohol intake on their Starcatcher world tour, support act Hannah Wicklund was delighted when the bus pulled up in the city that caters to her own flavour of hedonism. “I can’t keep up with Greta’s drinking. Those boys know how to party,” admits the singer-songwriter, sitting in her dressing room at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. “But they hold down the drinking fort, and I hold down the ‘smoking a fuckton of pot’ fort.”
Don’t bet against Wicklund returning as headliner soon. Not only a mischievous interviewee, the South Carolina native is also a traffic-stopping musician, whose thundering new album The Prize is an early contender for the year-end polls of 2024. Wicklund plays all the instruments (except bass and drums, handled by Greta’s Sam Kiszka and Danny Wagner), leads the writing and soars valkyrie-like over the melee with a vocal that can be curl-lipped or Stevie Nicks-otherworldly.
“The Prize was the ultimate labour of love and took every ounce of my being – the cells in my body are only just starting to replenish now it’s complete,” she says of an album that spans from the rippling minor-key jazz-rock of Witness to edgy, Heartworthy rockers like Hell In The Hallway.
Clearly a visionary, she admits her foibles can be infuriating.
“I had this crazy idea that I wanted to do the record in 432 [Hz] tuning instead of the standard 440.”
Still in her mid-twenties, Wicklund has been building toward The Prize for d
