Hammok ⟡ Roy Batty
Live music 13€
Friday 4 December · 22:00
Norway's Hammok bring the urgent, melody-laced hardcore of their album 'When Does This Place Become Our Scene' to ZDB, sharing the night with Roy Batty.
These days, there is an undeniable state of grace — creative, critical and media-savvy — around wide-vision hardcore punk. From the more or less mainstream collective consciousness of Turnstile or Knocked Loose, to indie darlings like Scowl or Soul Glo, to a heartfelt local communion, one feels like invoking the 'scene that celebrates itself' of shoegaze's bygone days, minus the derogatory tone of the time, for the feeling lived at concerts by Hetta or Prado, which crosses geographic and generational barriers with an effervescence not felt in a long while. A reflection of this, for the attentive eye, is that ZDB too has given space and vital time to bands born at the epicentre of or adjacent to this centrifugal movement, and it is on that wavelength that it welcomes Norway's Hammok. A trio germinated against the grain in the midst of the pandemic in the (now) bustling Oslo scene, whose recently released second album, When Does This Place Become Our Scene, on Sargent House fits perfectly into the dysfunctional family portrait of the Los Angeles label alongside The Armed or Botch. With the challenge thrown down in the album's title, furiously screamed in the piercing opening track The Scene, Hammok's music pulses with all the urgency and abandon of the most rabid hardcore while gradually revealing the melody that fixes these songs in memory. With a dirty but suitably clear production that avoids drowning in a mire of shapeless distortion, When Does This Place Become Our Scene hurls forward a dozen beasts, in a profusion of caustic riffs, rhythms that find groove as much as they drive everything forward in a single stride, electronic touches and incisive lyrics rooted in a reality that is as much the band's as it is easily recognisable almost anywhere. BS.