Men Guos hond er sterk

When this magisterial Faroese death-doom sextet’s second album Támsins likam emerged in 2017, the full line-up had rarely even been in the same country at the same time. After sporadically beavering away in remote isolation essentially as a studio project since 2008, Támsins likam was a highly acclaimed and powerfully emotive opus that thrust the mourning-suited band onto the world stage. Five years on, the accumulation of plentiful live experience and interpersonal chemistry has had a profound impact on Hamferð’s extraordinary third LP, feeding into the artisanal sonic vision of guitarist and sound engineer Theodor Kapnas. Concertedly eschewing all the quick-fix trickery of modern recording technology, the band recorded the songs playing all together live in the studio, without a click-track. The result is a resoundingly human album that heaves, swoops and shifts in elemental style - from passages of glacial post-metallic beauty through sorrowful folky goth cadences, via icy blackened blastbeats to shuddering vistas of extreme doom mastery - with a crackling tight-but-loose interplay recalling the giants of yesteryear. The narrative concept behind Men Guðs hond er sterk is inspired by a harrowing local event: the 1915 whaling disaster off the Faroe Island village of Sandvik (home of Hamferð keyboardist Esmar Joensen), when 14 men died driving whales ashore in the stormy bay. The village population, gathered to help kill the whales, witnessed the tragedy from the seaside. Fittingly, the sad tale has enabled Hamferð to powerfully bring to life the meaning behind their Faroese name, zeroing in on the traumatic emotional force behind this supernatural phenomenon. “When you see someone in hamferð, you see their apparition,” Theodor explains. “Mostly it’s wives with husbands at sea, who’ve seen them dripping wet in the doorframe in the middle of the night. Typically in folklore it’s a warning that something bad will happen, and there are several documented episodes of this happening at Sandvik in 1915. So it’s kind of full circle for us.”