(written by Islander)
Tomorrow, on the first Friday the 13th of 2024, ATMF will release a new EP by the Italian/Norwegian duo Hammerfilosofi. Its full name is SOLUS (Igne Natura Renovator Integra).
The EP follows by almost exactly one year the band’s first release and debut album The Desolate One, which we premiered here, calling it ” fanatical, fiery, and frightening,” but also “a harrowing esoteric process of liberation and elevation.”
ATMF portrays the new EP as “four psalms of relentless, multi-layered, and hellish madness,” and the band’s NKTFR describes it as “an inward journey of spiritual violence and cathartic soul-searching,” picking up from where The Desolate One left off: “Both musically and conceptually we want to bring back some of that rebellious pride, wrath, and danger – some Blood, Fire, and Death – that for us are mandatory ingredients in Black Metal.”
As we did for the album, today we present SOLUS… from beginning to end.
Hammerfilosofi do bring blood, fire, and death on their new EP, and it is the spectre of death they present at the outset, opening their first song “Hunt or be Hunted” with the reverberating tones of a ghostly piano (backed by theremin-like quivering tones), a rendering of the famous third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2, the “Marche funebre”.
That creates a skin-shivering spell, but Hammerfilosofi then bring the fire and fury, causing the song to explode in a high-speed conflagration of obliterating drums, boiling yet dismal riffage, and howls of utmost agony. From there, they twist the music into more otherworldly and frightening shapes, which are both psychedelic and psychotic, in between renewed outbursts of rage and torment.
The vocals twist too, but they are never less than terrifying in the extremity of their fury and misery — except when the band bring in distorted spoken words. In a penultimate phase, when the snare drum snaps like a metronome, the music pulls us into mind-freezing nightmare, only then to smash the frozen mind into shards — but with something softer and more dismal at the end.
In creating their music, Hammerfilosofi are steeped in the spirit of black metal from a by-gone time, but “Hunt or be Hunted” shows how multi-faceted and dynamic they are in giving that spirit its many frightening shapes.
They continue doing that in the next three songs, and continue bringing forth vocals that sound genuinely tortured as their blood-soaked screams and long wails rise and fall.
“Alpha Ego” sounds genuinely apocalyptic, vast and ruinous, yet with ingredients of devastating symphonic grandeur in tandem with the frenzies of musical beasts and electrifying bursts of hyper-speed blasting. In this one the trilling lead-guitar wails too, a reminder that in this band’s music agony and death are ever-present.
The songs often end or begin with vocal samples, and there’s one at the outset of “Holy Fire“, which fanatically persists as the music methodically but ruthlessly hammers and then sears, alternating the methods of ruination to be inflicted upon the emissaries of the church.
“Epigone of Tragedy” is also primitive and brutish, and also sweeping in its depredations. It crashes and crushes like the leagues-long strides of a giant beneath skies that are burning from horizon to horizon. When the giant pauses, terrible screams can be heard, and then the music races, like the hooves of hell-steeds clattering, urged on by the yells of a madman wielding swords of flame.
You will have a hard time finding anything else this year as frightening to the core as SOLUS…, or as vast in the scale of its visions of hellfire and ruin, or as utterly stricken and deranged in its vocal expressions. But don’t take our word for it — discover for yourselves:
SOLUS (Igne Natura Renovator Integra) was recorded at WS Studios during the Autumn of 2023 and Winter 2024, and it was mastered by Magnus “Devo” Andersson at Endarker Studios during the Spring of 2024.
Lyrics for the EP were penned by long-time comrade of the band, Rune Vedaa from the Norwegian black metal band Forgotten Woods. Credit for the EP’s visual design does to Francesco Gemelli. It’s available for pre-order now
PRE-ORDER:
https://atmfsssdtp.bandcamp.com/album/solus
HAMMERFILOSOFI:
https://www.facebook.com/hammerfilosofi/