Defenders Of The Faith, le forum Metal

Metal Blade Records recently announced the signing of up-and-coming doomsters Hamferð from the Faroe Islands. The band's new album, Támsins Likam, will be released on January 12th

About Hamferð:

Hamferð refers to an apparition: the image of a person facing death, appearing before his or her loved ones as an omen.

"Faroese doom metal" is a powerful sound. Exclusive to this self-styled tag is Hamferð. For a near decade, the funeral dressed sextet has been casting a unique expression rooted in conceptual tragedy and intense, narrative doom metal.

"Hamferð is heavily inspired by our natural surroundings and our cultural heritage. Those aspects combine into unique feelings and atmospheres which we attempt to describe through our music", comments guitarist Theodor Kapnas.

Faroese history and folklore are mixed together with grand atmospheres, a trademark that has earned worldwide attention. Stages at festivals such as Inferno, Midgardsblot, Tuska, Summer Breeze, Wacken and many more have been turned into funerary ceremonies. Touring with bands like Amorphis and Moonsorrow has further garnered the band a respected reputation due to strong yet solemn live performances.

The lyrical and conceptual approach is ambitious in scope. People are drawn to it, even though the band sings in their native tongue, Faroese. With a highly engaging idea concerning lyrics and songwriting, the hour has arrived to close a conceptual trilogy which commenced with the 2010 EP Vilst er siðsta fet, continued with the internationally acclaimed 2013 full-length album Evst, and is now concluded with the new album, soon to be announced.

Faroe Islands-based death/doom outfit, Hamferð, will release their Men Guðs hond er sterk full-length on March 22 via 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.

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," Kapnas 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 in Sandvik in 1915. So it's kind of full circle for us."

As a precursor to the release of Men Guðs hond er sterk, the band today delivers a video for first single and opening track, "Ábær". Offers Kapnas, "'Ábær' is about sailing through a hurricane, through ocean valleys, in a rowing boat and surviving it. The waves crashing, the wind and rain beating and biting you, death greeting you everywhere you look. Perseverance, melancholy, dread, willpower, endurance and doubt interweave with every note and word."