Sawyer Hill

When Sawyer Hill was 14, his Pentecostal parents made an unexpected concession: They signed an affidavit that allowed him to go to bars, so long as he was playing music and not drinking. For the better part of a decade, that was his life’s driver, gigging in the haunts of Northwest Arkansas, often for audiences of a few dozen. But in 2022, “Look at the Time”—a grungy rock hymn about the rock-hard bottom of a romance—exploded. Less than two years later, in February 2024, the song topped Spotify’s Viral 50. The natural showman’s career has since ballooned, with a string of hit singles already generating 50 million streams and 120 million video views—culminating in his debut EP, Heartbreak Hysteria, which released April 18th, 2025.

The last two years and a string of subsequent singles have proven that “Look at the Time” was no fluke. Hill has a knack for theatrical melodies delivered with a blue-collar believability, the grand gestures of the rock he loves reimagined for the up-close-and-personal. “High on My Lows” is an honest and instantly memorable confession about trying to stay sane, even as you get wild. The pensive but surging “Symphony” uses music as a metaphor for deliverance, for being swept up by anything bigger than you while you still can. Hill looks at life’s hardest parts and finds a way to shape them into an inescapable tune, so that all those who have been there can unburden themselves by shouting along for a few minutes at a time.

- Grayson Currin