Get To Know: Will Swinton

New Zealand is a smaller country, relatively speaking. That doesn’t mean there aren’t large voices keeping the nation’s music relevancy alive. Take Will Swinton for example. The 22-year-old singer from Auckland has a raspy voice that’s tailored for guitar-backed pop songs. Swinton released his seven-track Better Days EP in October 2023.

Swinton’s first extended release has multiple charting songs, like the top 10 New Zealand single “All For You” and two other ranking tunes. Slow burner “Wasted You” and his most popular streaming release “Leave In The Morning” both ranked in the top 15 on the same chart.

More impressive than having three top 15 hits in his home country by age 22, Swinton has already played at some of the biggest festivals in the world. He recently played at New Zealand’s largest arena and is requesting fans to plug their cities so he can make more tour stops in 2024. Swinton has even found a major American fan in Machine Gun Kelly and quickly got a spot on the Capitol Records roster. He’s played at SXSW in Austin, Texas and Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Spain.

Here’s what Swinton has to say about his experience as a young and popular singer up to this point:

BTS: You’re a couple of weeks past the arrival of your new EP Better Days. How are you feeling about it?

Will Swinton: It feels really good, but it’s a bit weird because I’ve been sitting on these songs for a while. When you kind of are sitting on music, it’s hard to bring it out to the world when you’ve been hearing it for so long. For example, I used to do design and when I would spend too long on any design, I would become uninterested in it. Not that I’m uninterested in the songs, but I’m just like numb, kind of feeling that they gave me at the start just because I critique them and listen to them so many times.

BTS: Your fans seem to be as interested in ever. One of the selling points in your music is your deep and bellowing voice, especially at your age. It hardly sounds like you have to project. Is that something that comes naturally?

Will Swinton: I wasn’t always a singer. I didn’t really know I kind of had that sort of voice in me. Originally I wanted to be a DJ. I was trying to make this whole drum and bass DJ thing come to life. That didn’t last too long. When that didn’t work, I’m like, oh shit, well I’ve already spent all this money on Ableton software. Then I decided “All right, let me just get a little USB microphone.” I started just singing over little instrumentals, like instrumentals of other people’s songs on YouTube. Then I had a “hold on” moment and thought “This is kind of fun.”

BTS: Live performances are a newer thing for you then?

Will Swinton: Yeah, I did my first live performance at the start of this year. It was at a festival actually in New Zealand. We had a three-day notice. The owner of the festival called me and was like, “Yo, we want to put you on this New Zealand festival. It’s this weekend. We need to know if you can do it in the next hour!” I didn’t have anything set up or prepared. I was just like, “Oh shit!” and just said yes. One of my mates volunteered to do the sound. He didn’t know a thing about sound, haha! He didn’t know a thing about live performances or anything. He rented out this gear for three days until we went down to the festival. He just basically spent the whole time learning how to do the sound and we just figured it out and went and I just did this like solo show, no band or anything. It ended up being really fun. I did play a bunch of new music, a bunch of unreleased stuff. Most of my EP is sad songs. I’ve got a lot of unreleased ones that are just more uptempo kind of just really fun to play live and it was cool to see the crowd like really enjoy that. So after that, I did my first headline show a month after that. I played with a full band. We sold out my first headline show which was super awesome. And then we played a bunch of these unreleased songs as well. They seem to hit live now. I’ve got some exciting shows coming up. I just played festivals and shows all year to try and get more and more comfortable with them.

BTS: Word on the street is you had a run-in with Machine Gun Kelly in America. What was that interaction like?

Will Swinton: We met at a bar in Idaho. He just randomly was like, “Yo, dude, you’re from New Zealand, right? What do you do?” I’m like, funnily enough, I actually am doing music. He says, “You know, I’m doing a show out here tomorrow. I want you to come backstage and play me your shit, man!” Me and my manager went to his show the next day and we went backstage. I thought it was going to be him and like his entire entourage, his whole squad. I was just going to be squeezing in the backstage, like in the corner. We walk in and it was just him. He’s got these huge speakers set up. He gives us the aux cord and goes, “Play me the shit you were telling me about! and I’m like, oh, like, okay. I was nervous about releasing the songs I played, but that kind of just gave me the boost to release it. He called his manager on the spot and made his manager come and listen. Crazy week.

BTS: You’ve got big shows under your belt and big contacts too. What’s the near future looking like?

Will Swinton: Something I want to just focus on is this next year as a whole. Getting out and doing a lot of shows around the world. I did a little tour around Europe and the UK this year where we played two shows in the UK. Our live band made it to Primavera in Spain, which was awesome. New Zealand is tiny. It’s a little bubble. Everyone knows everyone in New Zealand and it’s kind of nice to get out to these countries that are just like massive or just have heaps of people and it’s just like you kind of forget that you know. It’s not just this tiny little bubble.

Will Swinton’s Better Days EP is out now. Scroll down to hear the full release.

Swinton is also making public requests where fans can request tour destinations in 2024. Fans can submit their hometown here.

You can stay updated with Will Swinton by following him on Instagram.

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Ben Pagani

Music Projects Manager at Beyond The Stage Magazine

Joining BTS as an intern in summer 2021, Ben stayed with the team as a writer and has been an editor for several years. Ben’s journalistic background includes 4 Emmy award wins for news producing. They grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and lived in Cleveland, OH for several years before finding a new home in Minneapolis, MN. They’ve found new and exciting ways to tap into the local music scene no matter where they’ve lived. Working at BTS has now opened the gates to chatting with top global artists. When they aren’t writing for BTS, they can be found riding a bicycle or spinning records while DJ’ing across the midwest.