Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk, the new full-length from Faroe Islands-based death/doom collective HAMFERÐ, is out today on Metal Blade Records!
When this magisterial sextet’s third album Támsins likam emerged in 2018, the highly acclaimed and powerfully emotive opus thrust the mourning-suited band onto the world stage. Louder Sound championed, “a stunning triumph,” Heavy Music HQ concurred lauding a, “tour de force for the band,” while Bandcamp Daily observed accurately, “HAMFERÐ presents metal’s obligatory preoccupation with dying in a light we rarely see it, finding melodrama, romance, and – yes – beauty in mortality.”
Six years on, the accumulation of plentiful live experience and interpersonal chemistry has had a profound impact on HAMFERБs extraordinary fourth LP, Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk, feeding into the artisanal sonic vision of guitarist and producer, Theodor Kapnas. Avoiding all the quick-fix trickery of modern recording technology, the band recorded the songs 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.