Bat-cats, Gothic tales, and alt-pop brilliance: welcome to the darkly enchanting world of Gretel Hänlyn.

Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
Make-up: Louisa Copperwaite using Fenty Beauty

Gretel Hänlyn is drawn to darkness. Not like in a bleak, existential misery kind of way, more as fantastical storytelling. One of Gretel's favourite things is bats. They're pretty dark, right? She's also obsessed with cats. Primarily cats that look like bats. We'll let her fill you in, "Anyone who has followed me on social media will know that I'm obsessed with cats," she explains. "I like all cats, but I've always quite liked those ones with no hair. The ones that look like shaved rats or something. I think they're perfectly freaky. I've always thought, even though they're not cats, that bats look like cats, and they can fly and are adorable and can wrap themselves up in their wings."

When she's not thinking about bats or cats or cats who look like bats, Gretel is also making music. Really good music. Music that marks her out as one of the most exciting talents making indie alt-pop today. She's spent the last few years turning Maddy Haenlein into the alluring and richly evocative music of Gretel Hänlyn as she has expanded her beguiling folk-tinged indie songs into ever greater and more ambitious visceral rock music. As we talk to her in a Mexican restaurant on her first American tour, waiting for a very large margarita to arrive, the twenty-year-old singer, songwriter, guitarist and newly minted alt-pop star is reflecting on a very good year in which she has released her stunning second EP, 'Head Of The Love Club', as well as a string of killer singles. "This year has been a really lovely build from last year," she begins. "I really love how steadily it's been going. It hasn't felt like anything has spiked in an uncontrollable way. It's been an incredible year of doing lots of shows, meeting lots of fans, building my fanbase, and really getting into writing and challenging myself as a writer."

Her songwriting and storytelling abilities and knack for bewitching wordplay mark Gretel as a special talent. It's a craft she's spent years honing and is forever evolving. "I've been going into rabbit holes left, right and centre and trying to find that thing that I want to have when I'm writing," she explains. "I've definitely almost had it, but I'm trying to refine it and find the purest form of writing I possibly can." There's a constant desire within her music to take things further, either musically or thematically. In 2023, she felt like all the pieces that make Gretel Hänlyn so exciting were falling into place on the back of the most productive year of her career so far. "It's been a year of artistic discovery," she smiles. "Just before going on tour, I finally came home to myself as an artist. I feel like I really understand myself and the fundamental values of what I want as an artist. I want to enjoy writing and get some catharsis from it. It doesn't have to be anything other than pure writing. It doesn't have to be clever. That's what 2023 has been for me. Discovery and building, building, building."

The thing that Gretel is building, is music in its most primal form. Powerful emotions distilled to their purest qualities. The realities of trying to make it in the music industry, though, often force artists to second guess themselves or subconsciously work against their natural impulses. As her nascent career has progressed, Gretel's development as a writer has seen her fully realise that those early impulses are most potent. "It's so interesting because when I first started writing, it was what I think of as really pure, just feeling your way through the dark type of writing," she reflects. "Feeling it out and using instinct. That's when I first started going to the studio and challenging myself with writing parts for instruments other than just guitar and vocals. As my musical tastes developed, I naturally put more pressure on myself to be smarter with my songwriting. Even copying certain sounds or certain atmospheres for songs and getting inspired by other things but feeling my way through the dark around it. I went down a rabbit hole of feeling like nothing was right, and nothing was ever enough. I was never clever enough, and it wasn't leftfield enough. That's the rabbit hole I went down this year, and I've come out the other side and I'm back to feeling my way through the dark and not knowing or trying to force my writing anywhere. I'm not pressuring myself to compare myself or my career to other artists that are maybe the same age as me or have a similar sound."

There might be some artists out there who have a similar sound in that they also make music primarily focused on guitar, but there's no one out there quite like Gretel Hänlyn. Distinctive and singular in a way that makes her stand out, she's continuing a lineage of women making exciting indie music while also forging her own path. "I always had obsessions growing up with artists in the same way that a lot of quite young women obsess over a certain band or another female artist or a boyband, or an emo band. I always had those obsessions, and I would deeply follow the characters," she remembers. "I don't think it actually clicked with the writer inside of me until I started listening to Wolf Alice. Female-fronted guitar bands. I looked at it, and I was like, wow. That sounds absolutely incredible, the amount of energy and female rage. I found it all very impressive. I was also getting into a lot of folk music when I was 14, and that inspired me to start writing. It was a combination of having that representation in female guitar bands plus the songwriting inspiration of people like Tim Buckley and Nick Drake. Nico was a big influence earlier on because she had a low voice, just like me. That encouraged me to feel allowed to sing. It was that musical and songwriting element, plus I was writing a lot of gothic stories at the time, as well inspired by Nick Cave. It all had a bit of a folky beginning, and then I got into the studio and started using other instruments, and it all got a bit grungier and full band-y."

Those gothic stories are what became the heart of Gretel Hänlyn; from her debut EP 'Slugeye' to the grand flourishes of her latest work, it's all there. It's not just despair and sadness, though; despite the emotional resonance of her music, often it's playful and funny and engaging. There's a gothic underbelly which allows her to take her songwriting stories to wonderful places. "It's a bit cheeky," she laughs. "It's just being real because one thing that I love is the beauty and the humour in the grotesque. It's making jokes about something bleak because nothing is ever black or white; nothing is ever just completely shit. There's always something funny; there's also always something depressing about something really happy that's happening. There's always something incredibly pretty about something horribly ugly. It's using the contrasts to make people smile or cry if they feel like they shouldn't be smiling." It's these amplified emotions crashing into each other that make her songs such rich tapestries. "Exactly! Black looks blacker next to white, and white looks whiter next to black."

As the world of Gretel Hänlyn becomes more expansive, she's looking for ever more elaborate ways to take things further. This may or, intriguingly, may not involve a debut album in 2024. "I'm currently working on a body of work, and I'm deciding what I want it to be," she says. "Whatever it is, it's the final milestone of me building the base of what my music is going to stem from. This is the last chapter of the beginning. It's a mixture of both challenging and really great, well-written music, and then from there, the main thing for me is touring and playing music live. That's my favourite part of all of this, playing live and travelling."

Nothing is certain right now other than the possibilities are endless. "I want to develop it more as the budget allows. I want to get stuck into maybe choreography; that might be a mad one for me, but I just want to dig around and see. This project is an honest representation of me as a person and the world around me, so it's hard to predict exactly what is going to come because it depends on me. It's a very human thing, so it depends on life."

Does she think she's now found her voice as Gretel Hänlyn? "I didn't realise I had found my voice until very recently," she replies. "All it's going to take is just releasing more of the stuff I have for people to understand what that voice is, but I'm using it already. It's about making my music connect with people and making them feel things, especially young women like myself; that's such a demographic that I love to reach out to."

Let's talk about that voice for a second. It's a staggering thing. Forced to sing in a particularly lower register due to medical issues earlier in her life, Gretel has used this in increasingly inventive ways, particularly in how she uses her vocals as texture in her work. "As time goes on and my body heals from the issue I had with my diaphragm, I don't need to think that way to be able to sing, but I still may," she says. "It became very liberating being able to pick and choose the way I sing and choose different characters depending on the atmosphere of the song and what kind of presence I wanted it to have. Each song needs its own personality and its own atmosphere. It's an instrument, isn't it? You wouldn't play a saxophone solo one way the whole way through; you'd add a bit of vibrato here and there."

Rather than purely a solo endeavour, Gretel sees her project and the people who contribute to it, like her incredibly powerful touring band, as an amorphous thing, with each part enriching the others. A key part of this process is her relationship with super producer and sonic visionary Mura Masa, who is her closest collaborator. "Gretel is also the people I work with that help me produce; for example, Mura Masa, I consider him the second member of Gretal," she confirms. The dynamic between the two artists is an interesting one in which they both complement each other. "Honesty is what he would learn from me," she says. "Honesty and actually trying to connect before trying to be smart and outsmart someone. He's hyper-intelligent, but sometimes when we're talking, I'm like, 'Yeah, but no one's going to get that. It's not going to connect. If it's for you, then totally do it, but if you want it to connect to someone, then maybe do something a little more realer'. This is why we work so well together because we both love finding that balance."

"I've learned tenfold from him," she continues. "He's one of my favourite people ever because I've learned so much from him. He's taught me to do things in one take. He's a serial one-take wonder. He says, 'Okay, it sounds shit now, but the second you finesse it, it will lose all the imperfections that you thought were mistakes'. The way that I write now is improvisation."

Content not to be a fleeting viral sensation, Gretel is in the process of building something to last. There's no magic secret to success other than trusting your own judgement. "I think it's much harder to be successful when you're trying to be above people," she ponders. "If you're trying to be the most this or the most that. What works is when you're just being real and being yourself. Sometimes, things align perfectly. You have what you need at that moment. There's not a checklist to follow. It depends on you. It depends on the way you like to phrase your sentences or the way you dress. It depends on so many things. You never know which variable is going to be the thing that makes you stick out and gets your head above the water."

In 2024, Gretel's main ambitions are to continue building and reaching new heights. She's already played her biggest London show this year at Village Underground and is looking to step up to the next rung on the way to her ultimate goal of headlining a stage at Glastonbury. But what about some of the new music she's working on right now? "I'm not sure yet that this is the debut album. All I know is that I've got loads of songs, so it probably is. When I was writing it, I was thinking it's a cult classic," she laughs. "It's a collection of songs; some of them have some really gnarly parts. Each song is quite fearless. Each song sticks out like a sore fucking thumb. I love it." She also excitedly teases what might be her best song yet, "I have written a six-and-half-minute track that feels brutally Gretel. It's called 'Shame'."

At one, with herself as an artist and the world that she's inhabiting, Gretel Hänlyn is setting a marker for other new pretenders to try to reach. Good luck. "I just want to release loads of music and just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. I'll use that to write a big body of work. This is the first chapter of this next bit where I'm fucking Gretel Hänlyn."