Hannah Wicklund - 'The Prize' Strawberry Moon Records, Friday 12th January 2024

Hannah is now 26-years old, originally from Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, but now piloting her own career out of Nashville, TN. Folks lucky enough to have seen her live before - maybe last year in the UK with Greta Van Fleet - will know that she’s a powerhouse vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with some serious guitar skills, but there’s even more to her than that. This batch of songs has been brewing for a couple of years now. They bring to life some vivid tales of a young girl learning the hard way on the stepping stones of life before bursting into womanhood and unleashing her raw power and confident femininity with a primal scream and a raging guitar.

As well as being an astonishingly mature song-writer, Hannah is also an accomplished artist and she’s produced the cover art and several other oil paintings which appear in the booklet that comes with the album. You can feed your head with samples of the art in the video wonderland created for the opening track ‘Hell in the Hallway’. Its elegiac brilliance draws you down psychedelic corridors and hedgerows and is accompanied by a soundtrack of some seriously fuzzed-up and f*cked up guitar work.

In its own way, lead single ‘Hide & Seek’ is actually a love song, albeit a dark and twisted one. For once, it’s not about the bitter end but rather the start of a relationship and the flammable dangers of the honeymoon period. The complementary artwork depicts a horny rabbit - actually the mythical Jackalope of North American folklore - enticing a lover into a maze and daring them to open up and tell the truth. Its raw and honest and builds up to a suitably fiery fret-work climax from Hannah.

This album is presented solely in Hannah’s name, unlike previous offerings, but she’s still got some heavyweight collaborators on the project in Sam Kiszka and Daniel Wagner from Greta Van Fleet. This is Sam’s first production credit outside of his family’s band and he also plays bass and keyboards, with Daniel handling the drums. It all fits together beautifully and between the songs, the sonics, the musicianship and the art, it really is a complete package.

The middle-section of the album showcases Hannah’s soulful bluesy side and vocal prowess, starting with ‘Song Bird Sing’ which, despite the title similarity, is not at all like Christine McVie but it is perfect all the same. That song and the plaintive longing and regret of ‘Can’t Get Enough’ make a sandwich around the melancholic tour-de-force of title track ‘The Prize’ which sits at the beating heart of the album and features piano, strings and a sacrificial vocal lament.



The GVF boys add mightily to the rootsy Americana feel of ‘Intervention’, which benefits from fabulous multi-layered vocals, and also the sinister ‘Dark Passenger’ which initially hides its pitch-black impulses under deceptive jazzy interludes before bursting into scary life. Their contributions are great, but ultimately, it’s all about Hannah really. She wraps up the album with some genuinely great guitar-work on ‘Sun to Sun’ and this album really does present the sound of a blossoming talent truly coming-of-age.

Hannah has an extensive world tour lined up, starting close to home in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia in early February and then running through much of the USA and Canada in Spring. After a short stop in Nashville, she arrives in the UK in May, including a date at The Garage G2, Glasgow on Friday 31st May 2024. Frankly, having heard these songs, I fear she’s been booked into rooms which are now not big enough for her talents, so it may be wise to grab tickets early before word gets out and more people hear the album.

This young lady’s time has come and she surely has the world at her fingertips.