Remi, in January 2018 Hamferð released the former album ‘Tamsins Likam’ and in 2019 it was followed by the EP ‘Ódn’. Were you satisfied with how people received those works?
Yes, I believe so. The previous albums were having a continuous storyline within a musical setting. We achieved our goals very well and we were very happy with how people seemed to receive it. Beyond surprise I would say, because it is not the kind of music that you would expect. It has a kind of progressive approach of doom music, it is kind of different. It is like a niche within a niche. So we were very happy that – in despite of those categories so to speak – it seemed to have a proper appeal. We are very thankful for that.

After that story, it was time to find a new subject on the new album ‘Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk’ and you have chosen a local event from 1915 in Sandvik. How did you come to that story?
As far as I know, it is a real story that happened in a village called Sandvik – as you say – which is the home village of our keyboard player Esmar Joensen. I think he mentioned it to us earlier, that it might be relevant to our type of music. I think we all agreed immediately. Of course we needed to complete what we had started on our earlier records, but once we were finished with those, I think we were immediately thinking about what the next theme or topic would be. Of course that kind of event is rich for taking emotion out of this terrific tragedy and it is a very human event so to speak, at least in the Faroe terms. It was normal to anticipate in the whaling events. It happened in this tiny village. Pure horror, while friends and family could only watch from the shore, it puts the context in a human emotional setting. You can imagine the horrors of being at the ocean, in the ocean and the people watching it from the shore. Of course the aftermath and the days and years after and the people who came from the neighbouring villages to help out, they had to go back home and tell everyone what happened. So there were a lot of surrounding emotional themes to dig in, so to speak.

But the concept fits very well with your approach from telling old tales about dead and missing seamen…
Well, it goes hand in hand with the overarching theme. Hamferð – as you might know –  is a Faroese term for these specific type of fairies, omen or premonition where it is said that the past remains. If you have a dear one who was at sea and you see their corpus in the door or at the shore or something, that is an omen that they will die. So that goes very well hand in hand with this specific event, also because many people said that, during and after the whale attack event, they saw people. So it is very closely linked.

And really something from your home country, because it is a true tradition, the whale hunts. There is a lot of international protest against it as well…
Yeah yeah it is a controversial activity at some parts of the world, but mostly in the Faroe Islands, it is something that has been done always. There are different opinions about it of course. All countries are in a constant state of development, we will see how it turns out in the future for us.

In the meantime we have noticed that there are two new members in the band since the former album. In February 2020 your co-founder guitarist John Egholm was gone. Why did he leave and how did you find the new force?
There were no personal problems. I mean, we have our lives and he has his life and in the end the economic situations and regarding the band – all this kind of stuff – it made it impossible for him to continue. It was up to us to find a way to make it work again. We were very sad when he had to leave, but we are still on very good terms. We are still good friends. He has another band now which is called Hamradun, also releasing records. Actually they just released a new record two weeks before us. We are still walking in the same lane. We knew Eyðun beforehand. Tórshavn is a small town, the metal scene is a small community. Everybody knows everyone. We knew him from many years in the scene and around other bands and stuff and before John left officially, he was unable to join us for some live shows and for those shows we asked Eyðun if he could step in as a temporarily substitution, which he was happy to do. When the decision was made that John was unable to continue, it was a natural choice to ask Eyðun if he could join, which he was happy to do and he has been given great input into the new tracks we have written. He has given a fresh input. It is a different input from a different person, so that has given some freshness to our way of writing.

I think the new bass player Jenus has been in the band before, isn’t it?
That’s right. He was our second bassist and now also our fourth bassist. No hard feelings though for our former bassist Isak Petersen. Again, it is how life just turned out, how you can cope with economic situations, friends and family and all those kinds of stuff. No drama or anything, just the reality.

And it was during the covid-19 pandemic, not an easy time…
Indeed, some people were harder affected economically and of course emotionally by corona than others. Personally my work did not affect me, but some people who depend on going out in public for their work, and also with the music, if you were depending on playing gigs, of course you had no income for three years or so. Of course it was hard for many people in the field.

The funny thing is that the first show you played after the pandemic happened to take place in the Netherlands, at the Brainstorm festival…
We always enjoy going… anywhere, basically. We play mostly Europe, but we are working on expanding the scope a bit in the future. Of course it is still in the works, but we are working on it. Of course we also come to Europe.

This album is created all together with the input from everybody in a room, quasi live and it is also recorded in a special way without click-track. Was it for you a nice experience, working like this?
Yeah it is something we spoke about for ‘Tamsins Likam’, the previous record, but it did not really fit. We didn’t feel like we could deliver it the way we wanted to. Of course it is a bit nerve wrecking. When you record with a click-track, it is a bit easier to make clean-ups so to speak. Any small mistakes that happen can be hidden or removed. That is the normal way of doing it today and there is nothing wrong with that. This was a bit more the old school way, which makes everything exposed, saturations and tempos, they are left exposed. So it is not perfect. People may think that it is less tight, but that is not necessary how we want it to be. It just has to be imperfect in a musical way. And that can be very, very good but it can also be hard to achieve. We try to achieve a sound that reflects our live performances, which are always fantastic. So we wanted to recreate that as well as we could, so that was why we wrote the songs that way and recorded the songs that way. That was a conscious effort from the beginning of the process, basically from when we started writing songs. I am happy with how it turned out. We are all very keen on the rest of the songs to be released. We have a new single tomorrow actually.