Stationed on an island 40 miles south of the Faroe Islands’ main landmass, Streymoy, the tiny, shore-clinging hamlet of Sandvik is home to two monuments to seafaring peril. Standing over the slate-rock western bay is a broad stone cross in honour of 10th Century Christian Viking chief Sigmundur Brestisson, who swam from a distant shipwreck to shore, only to be immediately beheaded by a local for his gold armband.
Five hundred yards down the road, overlooked by a daunting, grey-green wall of mountain jutting out into a wind-whipped aquamarine fjord, is a fenced-off gravestone, erected in honour of 14 sailors who lost their lives on their return from a whaling expedition in 1915.
On the black sands where the villagers witnessed their loved ones being overtaken by the waves, Hamferð keyboardist Esmar Joensen is recounting the horrors of the latter disaster and the reverberations that persist more than a century later. It’s the subject of his band’s latest album, Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk (‘But God’s Hand Is Strong’).
“Of the two ships that went down,” he explains, “only one sailor survived. He was pulled out of the sea on a rope, and they found the body of his son ensnared at the end of it. Entire bloodlines were wiped out, but his daughter’s still alive. She’s 93, and she still lives just up the road from here.”
The son of local sheep farmers, Esmar is combination of bookishness and sturdy inner stillness as he recounts the story with the gravity of a personal witness. Growing up here in Sandvik, he was always drawn to this spot, staring out across the sea and wondering how its elemental, capricious nature could be translated into sound. The answer turned out to be Hamferð themselves, one of the most transformative bands to have emerged from the metal underground in recent memory.
Hamferð – pronounced Hamferth with the softest of ‘th’s, the name a folkloric word for the ghosts of loved ones lost at sea – were formed in 2008, amidst a tiny local metal scene where only Viking/folk metallers Týr were gaining international attention or exploring indigenous themes. Initially inspired by My Dying Bride, and habitually bedecked in Faroese funeral suits, they’ve managed to transmute the fairly niche realms of death- and funeral doom into the kind of oh-my-god-have-you-heard-this, word-of-mouth experience that transcends genre trappings.
That’s in no small part down to frontman Jón Aldará’s astonishing vocals, ranging from deep growl to heartrending tenor as though he’s been stricken by divine ordinance to give voice to humankind’s existential plight. The video for the band’s exquisite 2015 track, Deyðir Varðar, featured them upon a Faroese mountaintop during a solar eclipse. It was a moment of spectacular, soul’s-journey synergy that’s garnered 500K YouTube views and reams of awed testimony often equating it to a religious experience.
Across an extended debut EP, Vilst Er Síðsta Fet, and two albums, Hamferð have become to the Faroe Islands what soon-to-be-tour-mates Sólstafir have become to their native Iceland, giving voice to both remote, alien landscapes and deep, emotional contours for which the most core-shaking of responses is one of recognition.
Jón and Esmar are sitting in the keyboardist’s living room, in one of the gaily painted, rigidly geometric buildings holding fort against the elements along Sandvik’s coast and the expanses beyond. For them, their surroundings have always been deeply embedded in Hamferð’s music.
“From the first song we ever wrote as a band, for Vilst…, we had the element of battling the forces of nature,” says Jón, a biologist and avian conservationist in his day job whose thoughtful, laidback nature is a far cry from his wrought singing persona. “It was from the perspective of a man at sea saying farewell to the world as a storm takes his boat.”
Rather than merely mine such scenarios for melodramatic potential, Hamferð’s approach has always been to find a route to both the essence of Faroese culture – the melancholia, and the struggle to survive amongst hostile environments – and the moments that define each of us, in our most critical states.
“It’s very personal thing for me,” says Jón, “but in a setting that I feel is uniquely Faroese. It’s such a small community here that death is always very close, as close as joy in life, and all these are very prominent, because you’re basically getting what you can out of the land and out of the sea.”
Marooned in the middle of a 920-mile stretch of the North Atlantic ocean between the coasts of Norway and Iceland, the Faroes is a land of contrasts. In clear weather, the snowdusted mountains along the winding Faroe highways give way to sudden views of vast, islet-dotted ocean expanses. It appears so primordial yet hyperreal you have to convince yourself they actually exist.
On Streymoy’s south coast, the remains of an ancient stone church overlook a grey, stormchurned sea as it’s whipped by 90˚ rain. It’s a landscape that can feel indifferent to the humanity that persists on its own, internal scale. Giving voice to that scale, Hamferð’s first two albums, 2013’s Evst and 2018’s Támsins Likam, completed a narrative arc, pulling the perspective back to examine the life of the fictional doomed sailor: the regrets and choices made, the squandering of his protective role as son, husband and father, all summed up in the most crushing and cathartic of coming to terms.
“We had to tell that story before we could write this album,” says Esmar. “The tragedy at the heart of this one was enforced by so many angles – the warnings the sailors were given and so on, and it’s so powerful that was a scary subject to tackle. We had to find our way through it and figure out how this would affect people and what the experience would be in that maelstrom of madness. It was very important to approach it respectfully rather than exploitatively.”
It’s Hamferð’s willingness to fully invest themselves in the emotional journey of their characters that makes Men Guðs… such an overwhelming yet relatable experience. Ábær’s Gojira-esque judders and chest-baring crests, the consolatory warmth infusing Glæman, and Hvølja’s extended, fall-of-Krypton subdrops are awash with dramatic grandeur. It all leads to the coda of the title track, featuring the haunting testament of the sole survivor, which resurfaced in a radio documentary to commemorate the tragedy’s centenary. His daughter granted permission for reuse on the album.
“She was really happy that somebody wanted to use that recording,” says Esmar. “It made her really proud and humbled just to hear her father’s voice again. It was important for us to even be able to approach his daughter so many years afterwards and get that blessing.”
That the recording is in Faroese is no bar to its impact, both the defiance and the weariness permeating his voice giving a sense of hardship that resonates beyond cultural borders. For Hamferð, Jón’s own decision to sing in his first language was never in doubt.
“Since we’re coming from this idea of writing Faroese doom metal, it fits very well to our general demeanour and our social culture, so it’s really the only option to me. And when you’re singing in a language that not many other people speak, it’s a really good test for audiences. Like if people are getting really emotional to it, you know you’ve done your job. It’s almost hard to witness when people are reacting so powerfully to what we’re doing in a way that’s beyond what we ever imagined.”
“Hamferð probably has more crying than moshing,” adds Esmar. There is an elephant in the room with regard to the new album. Or, more precisely, a whale. It hinges on the millennia-old Faroese practice of driving dolphins and pilot whales to shore in order to be butchered. Controversially, it’s a tradition that continues to this day, one that’s led to the local G! Festival being regularly boycotted and members of Týr being criticised for their involvement.
Hamferð have been regularly asked to denounce the slaughter. It raises the question of how the band balance a sense of Faroese identity with an awareness of the outrage the practice causes. “It’s something we’ve been faced with before, where people have criticised us for not standing up against whaling,” says Jón.
“I can absolutely understand gut reaction of thinking this is barbaric, and from the Faroese perspective it’s a complex matter. Is this violence for violence’s sake or is it necessary violence to procure resources? We need to be diligent about securing the least amount of suffering for these animals and the least amount of damage on wild populations.”
“The whaling wasn’t done for sport, and it wasn’t even for commercial reasons,” says Esmar. “We could have written the story from the perspective of the whale as well, but the story we wanted to tell was from over a hundred years ago, and it’s a story of how desperate people were. From their point of view, they were risking their lives not out of malicious intent, but to get food for their families, and some of them died for it. It’s a history we couldn’t look away from, and this was an album we felt we had to make.”
Forty-five miles north, the capital city Tórshavn’s National Museum hosts the 1942 painting Grindadráp by Sámal Joensen-Mikines, a vivid, historical depiction of the practice of whaling. A kinetic riot of red and black beneath a golden sky, contrasting with the determination of the boatmen thrusting spears into the whales, it’s both a recognition of tradition and a visceral horror show, its unyielding gaze a lurch into a world that, like whaling itself, is simultaneously repellent, emotive and a jolt to our collective humanity as much as any tale of personal human loss.
For the inhabitants of Tórshavn, Hamferð have become something of a national treasure. The following day they’re playing a launch show for the new album in Sirkus Föroyar, a traditionally styled theatre, all wooden panels, beams and high-sloped ceilings. The audience is incredibly diverse, from young kids to 60-year-olds. Casually dressed people mix with metalheads in Slayer hoodies and battle patches.
“I listen to techno, so you might wonder what I’m doing here,” says one punter outside. “But I absolutely love this band, and I had to come.”
The magic that hometown shows can often invoke, particularly for bands singing in their native tongue, is in full, tangible effect, the pride and anticipation reaching critical mass as the lights lower and the bandmembers appear onstage. They might not look like rock stars, but the asymmetrical, designer suits they’re debuting tonight bring as much style as the gravitas of their former, formal attire, and when Jón appears as the song Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk sets the magnetically solemn tone, his grasping of the mic stand as if it were a tiller and every inhabiting-the-moment gesture is an embodiment of the music’s impassioned swell.
No matter how used you are to the transitioning of growls to clean vocals, there’s no preparing for the sublime shock as the likes of Ábær and Í Hamferð pull out the most elegant, out-of-body of entreaties from both dense, organic churns and delicately glinting timbres. A closing Harra Guð, Títt Dýra Navn Og Æra, a revamp of an old Faroese psalm, with the entire crowd singing along, is the kind of true moment of communion whose roots feel infinitely extendable.
“Emotions are pretty epic,” say Jón, taking stock the next day. “If you materialise them into something that you relate to visually or physically in the world, then what better imagery than earthquakes and landslides and storms and raging seas?”
For all the tragedy wrapped up in the story of Men Guðs…, Jón hopes there’s a wider message to be found too. “The main aspect for me was the ability to push through even the darkest of experiences to save the remaining man who clung on, the ability to see the potential for hope when all seemed lost. He saw it as God’s work that one other boat survived, and for all the loss and heartache, it was an encounter with the miraculous.”
It’s that sense of the inexplicable as an act of reckoning and personal catharsis that Hamferð have always given rise to – a journey through our darkest realms that puts the moment of liberation into sharpest relief.
Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk is out now via Metal Blade. Hamferð tour with Solstafir and Oranssi Pazuzu from November 13 - November 24.
