(Today Metal Blade is releasing a new album from the Faroe Islands-based death/doom band Hamferð, and to help celebrate the event we’re sharing Comrade Aleks‘ recent interview with Hamferð guitarist Theodor Kapnas.)
Wow! Time flies by! It seems that the last interview we did with Hamferð here happened in 2014. Back then we discussed with the band’s vocalist Jón Aldará the debut album Evst, but I believe there was another interview a few years later, though my memory sometimes fails me. However, it’s March 2024, and Hamferð’s third full-length work Men Guðs hond er sterk is ready to be released on March 22nd.
Metal Blade Records presented two new tracks “Ábær” and “Hvølja” recently, and the album promises to be another gorgeous monument of epic Nordic death-doom, with Faroese lyrics of course. The band’s sound evolved a bit as far as it could be heard, but there’s always something worth talking about with such a man as Theodor Kapnas, Hamferð’s guitarist.
Hi Theodor! How are you doing? What’s going on in Hamferð’s lair nowadays?
Hey there! I’m doing good, thanks. There’s lots of stuff going on in the Hamferð lair at the moment, most notably we are looking forward to the release of our new album Men Guðs hond er sterk on March 22, and we have started rehearsing for a few special release shows around the release.
Five years have passed since the release of the Ódn EP. Where have you been all this time?
After finishing the Támsins likam cycle and releasing the Ódn EP we slowly started writing new music for this record. We are notoriously slow writers, and one of the reasons for this is that we usually don’t all see each other except for when we have shows or tours. Remi, our drummer, lives in Denmark, so we don’t have the possibility to rehearse and write together except when we’re in the same place. And in 2020 there was obviously the road bump of Covid, which means all shows and touring stopped, which in turn means there was a period where we weren’t all together in the same place. We used that time to come up with most of the ideas for the new record, and then after the world started opening up again we got together and finished the record.
Are you used to this slow pace of composing? Don’t you feel a pressure or an urge to complete new material faster? To keep your position? To keep people alert?
We are notoriously slow writers – there have been years between all our releases. We’re not that sensitive to time pressure, it’s more important to us that we release something unique which we can stand fully behind. However, we have already slowly started writing the next album, so hopefully there won’t be as many years until our next release!
How much time did it take to compose and record Men Guðs hond er sterk indeed? Was it born in labours? Did you throw out some of the ideas and start the work anew?
All our albums take a lot of work, and we always throw out a lot of ideas. We have a pretty specific idea of what music for Hamferð should feel like, and at the same time we don’t like doing the same thing twice, so to keep reinventing ideas while staying true to the core sound of Hamferð can be quite tricky.
Your Goresquad colleague Eyðun í Geil Hvannastein joined Hamferð in 2020. Did he take part in composing of the new songs?
Eyðun has been a fantastic addition to the band and has been heavily involved in writing the music for this record. We know each other well, and he is a very creative musician who thinks fundamentally differently about music than what I do. So he came up with the ideas for a few of the tracks, and we have been able to work together on pretty much all of the songs on the record. This album as a whole has been a more collaborative process than earlier records, I feel that everybody in the band has been involved in writing the music.
The first video you shared with the fans is “Ábær”, and it brings back the feeling of Hamferð we know. You have your reputation, so how important was it to keep your level? Did you keep in mind that your music should follow a familiar direction?
Hamferð is the main creative outlet for the six of us, so it’s very important to all of us that for every record we feel that we have put our full and undivided energy and attention into it and created something which we can be proud of for years to come. We do not want to make a compromised album, and if we felt that the music wasn’t good enough or not as good as our older stuff we wouldn’t release it – not to protect our reputation, but to protect our own integrity.
To me personally our music has a certain feel to it, which has to be present. But we are always exploring new ways to achieve those feelings, and it’s very possible that we will make music which is completely different in the future, as long as it feels like Hamferð to us.
What are the necessary elements which keep Hamferð’s identity? What are the integral parts of your sound that you couldn’t get rid of?
To me it has more to do with the emotional response to the music than any specific elements of our sound. I am a big fan of harmonic tension and dissonance, and I always look for a balance between harmony and dissonance when writing music for Hamferð. But at the end of the day sometimes a song feels “right” and sometimes it doesn’t. The last two tracks on the new record are an example of this – “Hvølja” and “Men Guðs hond er sterk” could not be more different from each other, but they both feel very much like Hamferð songs to me. We are always looking for new ways to convey those emotions.
On the other side, “Hvølja” sounds more powerful, crispy, as if you were in sludge theme as well, and at the same time it shows some progressive touches. Do you see some clear outside influences in the new material this time?
There is actually a pretty clear influence to the main idea behind “Hvølja”. We are all movie geeks, and I had a strong aesthetic experience while watching The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers. I was blown away by the eerie atmosphere and the general aesthetic of the sound design, so I sat down and tried to come up with a riff which was inspired by the very characteristic sound of the foghorn in the movie. At about the same time I had just got my hands on the plasma coil pedal by Gamechanger Audio, which has been my favourite toy in the world ever since. So I started playing around with that, and then things just naturally developed into “Hvølja”. It’s definitely different, very uncompromising, but it’s a track I’m personally very proud of. Don’t be surprised if there will be more similar stuff in the future…
Confirmed! The Lighthouse is criminally gorgeous! How did you interpret the movie for yourself? Was it all because of alcohol and isolation? Can you imagine yourself in such a situation?
It’s a weird movie, and I wouldn’t say I have a specific interpretation of it. I really enjoyed the acting performances, the twisted humour, and the Melville-esque dialogue. But the strongest impression the movie left on me was the atmosphere and aesthetic beauty of it – both the cinematography and the sound design are out of this world, to the point where the plot almost doesn’t matter. A bit like reading Moby Dick, where it’s so beautifully written that it doesn’t really matter that very little happens.
Did you have a general idea how Men Gu ð s hond er sterk should sound when you entered the studio? What kind of requirements did you have for Hamferð’s sound this time?
We had a very clear idea – we wanted this record to capture what Hamferð sounds like as a band. For previous records we have recorded in the “normal” way – one musician at a time with a click track. This gives a lot of flexibility, but you lose the fundamental dynamic which happens between the six of us when we play together. So we decided to have a few sessions with the whole band where we finished arranging the tracks and also rehearsed them to a point where we could record them live. We are a pretty experienced live band, and we groove in a certain way, so we decided to do the album live and without a click. And I feel we succeeded in capturing the essence of what Hamferð sounds like.
I have to give some extra props to Remi (drums); his performance on this record is incredible, and to think that it’s recorded without a metronome, drum editing, or drum samples is a testament to how good of a drummer he is.
Are you meaning that you recorded it live all together? Six of you? How did you manage to fit in the studio? It would be good to get a video of this process.
Yep, we recorded it all together, the six of us. We recorded it in Studio Bloch in Tórshavn, which is a big commercial studio, so fitting us in was no problem. We have very little footage from the recordings – I guess that’s what happens when everybody is focusing on playing the songs. But if we do it again we’ll definitely bring a cameraman…
The lyrics in your native tongue is one of the band’s features, and the narrative concept behind the new songs is inspired by the 1915 whaling disaster off the Faroe Island village of Sandvik. Is it an important event in Faroese history? Did you try another concept for the album?
No, I think it was quite clear from the beginning that the lyrical concept would be based around the whaling disaster in Sandvík, since it’s something which holds special significance for the band. The lyrics are not a factual representation of the event, but they are based around fictionalized events surrounding the specific tragedy in 1915.
What did Jón add to this story from himself?
We decided to not try to make the lyrics historically accurate, both because of the risk of inaccuracy and to respect the victims of the tragedy and their families. Therefore the songs are based around different imagined situations which revolve around the tragedy itself. One example is based around the hike home – the men who drowned that day were from two villages, Sandvík and Hvalba, and the survivors from Hvalba had to hike the long way back to their village knowing that when they arrived home they had to break the news that several of the men would never return…
How intense is your tour schedule this year?
We will be playing a few select release shows this spring to celebrate that the album will finally drop. These shows will be in Tórshavn, Copenhagen, and Oslo. We then have some festivals this summer, and we will be joining Sólstafir and Oranssi Pazuzu on tour through Europe in November. So there’s stuff going on, and we’re very much looking forward to hitting the road again!
Hamferð has a reputation as a strong live band, and I think that we can say there was a period when you appeared on most important doom and metal events. Or at least I got such an impression. How actively did you play since the Ódn release? Don’t you feel that you have to fight back your ground now?
There is always a bit of uncertainty when you wait six years between releasing records… However, the reactions we have seen to the release of our first two tracks have been very strong, and it definitely feels like there are still people out there who are looking forward to the album and to seeing the band live. We feel very humbled by that, and we want to make sure that people get the opportunity to see us live again. We have been preparing well for our upcoming shows, and with the nature of the album I think it might be our strongest live material to date. So yeah, we can’t wait to start hitting stages again!
What are Hamferð’s plans for the rest of 2024?
Like I already mentioned we have a few shows planned this spring and then some more touring coming later this year and early next year. Apart from that we have started writing music – getting the whole release machinery up and running has been really inspiring, and we want to use that inspiration to make sure that people don’t have to wait another six years for our next album.
Thanks for the interview, Theodor! It was good to talk about Hamferð, and I hope our readers now have a clearer idea what to expect from Men Gu ð s hond er sterk. Did we miss something important?
Thanks for the chat Aleks! I think we’ve mentioned most of the important subjects 🙂 I hope that people will enjoy Men Guðs hond er sterk when it’s released on March 22!
http://www.facebook.com/Hamferd
https://hamferd.bandcamp.com/album/men-gu-s-hond-er-sterk