As the title of her fourth album suggests, South Carolina blues-rocker Hannah Wicklund is not happy. There’s a tangled yarn behind these songs, a tale of love, deception, and career-undermining shenanigans, followed by resentment, anger and reinvention. She inhabits a musical world that’s pure CLASSIC ROCK, but the voice, the tunes and the emotional vehemence often carry it with a convincing degree of panache.
As far as I can deduce (some of the facts are murky), Wicklund had a relationship with Sam Kiszka of successful, sibling-led US rockers Greta Van Fleet. He produced her 2024 album The Prize. She was ensconced, to some degree, in that band’s management structure. Last year both the relationship and the business arrangement imploded in catastrophic rancour (including alleged death threats to Wicklund). This album is her impassioned response.
Musically, it sits somewhere between the 1970s output of femme-fronted US rockers Heart, the catchy, well-executed retro of Sweden’s Blue Pills, and the astutely crafted, genre cherry-picking of Halsey’s last album. But it’s powered by forceful righteous indignation.
“Powers-that-be will never scare me into the silence they crave/The threats on my life only prove that I was right about all of the secrets they’d hid,” run the lyrics to the enormous, fuzz-riffin’, Skynyrd-esque “Cowards & Kings”, which features searing electric guitar soloing. There’s more in this vein, from the acoustic strummed desperation of “Stockholm” (“How can you trust a man who made himself trustee on all of your homes”), to a slow-rolling, sassy cut simply entitled “Evil is a Corporation”.
As well as tasty, wangin’ rockers - “Red Gorilla” is a prime example - Wicklund ranges across styles, including the flutey, festival-swaying Alanis Morissette-meets-Fleetwood Mac FM radio pop of “Diamonds”. In fact, she sounds like someone who’s already an established star. While War on Women would be improved by trimming lesser tracks from its 50-minute length, there’s enough going on to suggest she might yet become one.
Below: watch the video for "Red Gorilla" by Hannah Wicklund
