Faroe Islands-based death/doom outfit HAMFERÐ will release their Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk full-length March 22 on Metal Blade Records.
When this magisterial sextet’s third album Támsins likam emerged in 2018 – ten years after they first entered a rehearsal space – the highly acclaimed and powerfully emotive opus 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 fourth LP, Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk, feeding into the artisanal sonic vision of guitarist and producer, 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 fourteen men died driving whales ashore in the stormy bay. The village population witnessed the tragedy from the seaside.
