Hamish Hawk talks ‘twisted, brutal’ new album A Firmer Hand

On August 16, acclaimed singer songwriter Hamish Hawk releases his third album A Firmer Hand, a dark, twisted departure of a record quite unlike anything the artist has shared to date. Headliner joins him for an in-depth look at the ‘vulnerable-making’ nature of the album, his obsessions with words, and the unlikely influence of the likes of ABBA and Disney…

It can be challenging at times to connect the warm, bright, erudite iteration of Hamish Hawk chatting so breezily to Headliner on a hazy spring afternoon with the version that reveals itself on his new third album A Firmer Hand. Joining us over Zoom from West Yorkshire where he is visiting family, he is incredibly generous with his time and as convivial a presence one could hope to encounter.

Over the course of his previous two records Heavy Elevator (2021) and Angel Numbers, Hawk’s sumptuous wordplay combined with an uncanny ability to carve out wistful, melancholy melodies has marked him out as a master of language among his contemporaries. Echoes of the humour and wit of Jarvis Cocker, Neil Hannon and Smiths era/early Morrissey can be detected across the indie rock infused chamber pop of both albums, not least in the form of some of the finest song titles seen this side of the millennium – This, Whatever It Is Needs Improvements; The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973; and Elvis Look-alike Shadows being just a few excellent examples.

A Firmer Hand, however, is a different beast entirely. The playful nature of those previous two records has been peeled away almost completely, save perhaps for lead single Big Cat Tattoos, to reveal what is by some distance Hawk’s darkest outing yet. It’s an album that plays out across a canvas of black ice, with everything from the musicality to the lyricism and Hawk’s vocal delivery filed down to a razor-sharp tip. There are splashes of his signature poetry and verbosity, but they are hard to pick out amidst the darkness.

Much of the album is concerned with, as he puts it, airing subjects he has previously felt unable to address, whether out of guilt, repression, embarrassment or otherwise.

“It’s definitely a darker record,” he says as we delve into the origins of A Firmer Hand. “People talk about the ‘difficult second record’, but I’m intrigued by what bands do with their third record. A band will often have a clear statement of intent on a first record, maybe follow it up with something similar, and then there are decisions to be made: continue in a similar vein, or take an about turn and do something completely different. I’ve found it quite common when looking at third records that there is either a complete departure or a darker twist or turn.

“It wasn’t necessarily that the band and I approached this record wanting it to be darker or take a different turn, it naturally came as a result of the first songs I wrote for the record – Questionable Hit and Machiavelli’s Room. Questionable Hit came first. It’s a song that is very much on the attack and is quite honest in a way that surprised me. I didn’t know it would foreshadow a new album - it was actually written before Angel Numbers was written and released.

“It was when Machiavelli’s Room reared its head that I knew that would be the tone for the album. It became clear very quickly that it would be impossible to have that song alongside the chamber pop of Angel Numbers. If it was going to sit on a record it would have to be alongside songs from a similar perspective, with a similar attitude. So, we didn’t set out to make a darker, twisted, more brutal record, it just happened. When I wrote those lyrics it was a surprise to me, and I knew almost immediately that whether or not it frightened me to do so I had to let that song be and let whatever else might come out of it be as well.”

It’s easy to see how the lyrics to Machiavelli’s Room would set the tone for all that was to follow. Its vivid descriptions of carnal encounters and tangled emotions take much of the album’s subject matter and distil it to its potent essence. Lines like, ‘I showed him hidden things, He coaxed them from hiding, There’s nothing he likes more than to watch me disappearing inside him’, demonstrate precisely what Hawk means when he speaks of exploring the previously unsaid so directly. And in adopting this approach, he felt compelled to dispense with some of the more whimsical language that defined his previous work.

“Since writing and recording this album, I’ve spent some time going over Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers, and when I was writing the lyrics to those albums I never… how to articulate this,” he begins before pausing to consider his words – something he does often during our time together. “It was never as if I was engaged in or looking to… it’s really difficult to get my words around it! I wasn’t trying to create artifice; I wasn’t trying to hide anything; but I love words, and I love knocking different words off other words and the contrasting ideas that come out of that. I love the interplay of different ideas, and Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers came very naturally to me, and they created a world in which this character Hamish Hawk – even though that is of course my own name [laughs] – could reside. I was playing games with words and dancing around with them a lot.

“With these first songs for A Firmer Hand there was a distinct lack of embellishment and overly poetic language. It was almost a test to see how plain speaking I could be. I wasn’t trying to be verbose or fanciful. It didn’t make much sense to me to have such honest and essentially blunt songs next to overly fanciful songs, so the album was about boiling it down to its essential parts while still feeling creatively satisfied by the lyrics I was coming up with.”

In writing this way, he says he learned a lot about the art of songwriting, and that he expects to learn a lot more about the meaning of this batch of songs once it is released to the masses.

“This album has taught me a huge amount about lyric writing and what’s important to communicate,” he says. “But it’s also been very exposing and vulnerable-making. It’s a funny thing when you write a record because even after recording it you don’t know what it sounds like. When you hear a recording, you hear yourself. For me it’s my voice or the lyric, for the band it might be the instruments, that’s what you focus on for the first several listens. And then, if you’re lucky, 20 or 30 listens later you start to hear something that an audience might hear. You play live enough times, and you get to know that what you experience onstage and what they experience out there are two different worlds. I’m really excited about this album coming out because I’m still in the dark as to what it really sounds like [laughs].”

While the process of writing A Firmer Hand was no doubt an invigorating process, it wasn’t without its challenges.

“I wrote and then disposed of far more lyrics than I did with the previous records,” he recalls. “With the previous albums there were times where the lyrics felt like catching lightening in a bottle. A lot of songwriters seem to describe this experience, which is where you sit down to write words, and you don’t know what you’re going to write. You’re sitting with the blinking cursor or the blank piece of paper in front of you, and if you’re lucky you become a vehicle for something that feels like it’s coming from out of the sky. With this album there were those moments, as I think there always will be with any creative pursuit, but it was also a very intentional record. I had lots of verses, choruses, and bridges, and I just condensed them down to the bare essential.

“At various times I was tearing my hair out with it. And I still feel like I don’t know what the songs sound like, but I can be sure that for the majority of the lyrics I chose the right path.”

One song that bucks the trend much of the album follows is lead single Big Cat Tattoos. Its disco beat and choppy guitars bear traces of Franz Ferdinand, while you can almost hear the cocked eyebrow in Hawk’s dry delivery on lines such us, ‘How I used to like to watch you fixing me a drink, ‘Til manhandling the crystalware became your kink’. On an album so sonically stark, it serves as a sparkling, mischievous interlude.

“That was a pivotal song for the record in my mind,” he smiles. “Each album I’ve written has had a song that had so much promise in terms of the lyrics it brought to the table. Sometimes Andrew Pearson (guitarist) or Stefan Maurice (drummer), will send me a demo and I will just spend a day in a café or at home and I’ll batter out some lyrics. I’ll write pages and pages, the majority of which will be terrible, but it’s almost like a blank canvas of a song and I throw the kitchen sink at it. I end up with a collection of images that surprise even me. Big Cat Tattoos is one of those.

“There were all kinds of images when I first started writing it that resonated with me in ways I didn’t expect,” he continues. “Each record has one of those tracks. With Angel Numbers it’s something like Money. With Big Cat Tattoos it was Colonel Tom Parker, the hot wars, the cygnet ring, the shoegaze, and the crystalware and the kink [chuckles]. All these words and images, it was an exciting song to write. Those songs are easily identified by me because you couldn’t possibly hope to have a handle on them the first time you hear them. Even as a songwriter you can write something like that and go, ‘seriously’? [laughs]. But as maximalist as those songs are lyrically, they are very carefully done. I’ll edit and redraft those songs. I haven’t just gone all-out and allowed everything to stick. They almost take the most attention, especially when it comes to things like rhythm. It has to sound right. I’ve heard it on the radio recently and it sounds absolutely bizarre [laughs]. You put it next to another song and it really sticks out. I hope that’s a good thing.”

The care with which Hawk treats words is frequently made evident throughout the course of our conversation. His manner is easy and unpretentious, yet he is always at pains to ensure his responses are colourful, interesting and informative, free from cliché and the trite, run-of-the-mill phrasing that can often arise when artists are in full promo mode.

This fascination with language is something Hawk says he has always been possessed of. So where did it originate from?

“It’s funny you should ask now as I’ve been musing on this myself over the last couple of days spending time with my family,” he tells us. “As long as I can remember, whether or not I was even aware of it, I’ve always been completely mesmerised by not only words but by lyrics. As a child I was an insatiable Disney fan and would wear out the VHS tapes of all the Disney films we had, just constantly rewinding and rewinding, and to this day I’m a bit of an aficionado with the classics when it comes to songs [laughs].

“When I think about Scar singing Be Prepared in The Lion King there are dynamite lyrics in that which I could never hope to match.

“As much as I’ve always been excited by words and the written word, the sung word is a particular passion of mine. I was hugely drawn to lyrics when I was a child just listening to my parents’ music. Classic rock’n’roll essentially, and the folkies like Cat Stevens and Kris Kristofferson. My brother was more hip-hop, a bit of metal, and my sister was Britpop through and through, so I had a nice mix. And being immersed in all that music, regardless of genre, a good lyric sticks out. You can almost forgive unsophisticated music as long as the lyric is strong; whereas you can have as sophisticated music as you like, but if the lyric is weak, you’ll probably just turn it off. You need to hear what that human voice is giving you. You need to feel it on some level. And good lyrics can be anything.

“In Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison he sings, ‘Pretty woman yeah, yeah, yeah, Pretty woman look my way’, and it doesn’t even rhyme, but it’s perfect. In the moment it’s perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah can be a great lyric. But it can also be something incredibly fanciful and embellished and articulate. I wish I knew better how to answer your question of how it started. It feels like it’s always been there. I pay extremely close attention to them, and I come down quite hard on bad lyrics! It doesn’t make me sound great, but it is true [laughs].”

In describing the process of melding of music and words to maximum effect he cites ABBA as masters of the art. Their commitment to servicing the song, he says, remains unmatched.

“They’re one of the most impressive bands of the 20^th century, and one of the reasons they shine so brightly is because their lyrics are not necessarily complicated but incredibly sophisticated. You couldn’t ask for better words. Take a song like Dancing Queen, which is just full of musical moments as well, but they are not seeking to do anything other than serve the song. Their music is incredibly complicated, but you don’t need to know that to appreciate it, and that goes for the music and the words. I think they are one of the most immediate bands you could hope to listen to. They just get you. And they are so singular; they are almost their own genre. It sounds almost perverse to say that because they are obviously part of a wider genre, but they are their own entity. Not many bands can do that.”

We round off our conversation by revisiting the theme of third albums and the often-pivotal role they can play in an artist’s career trajectory. He refers to The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells and Arctic Monkeys’ Humbug as notable cases in point. In the case of Hawk and A Firmer Hand, it’s hard to see the record as anything other than a creative cornerstone; one from which new artistic avenues appear bound to unfurl.

“For the band and I, despite it not being out yet, we are happy that this album is demanding its own seat at the table,” he remarks. “There is an electricity in the air that holds a certain promise. I’m really pleased it’s the third album and I can’t wait for people to hear it. I hope it goes down a treat!”

You can listen to this interview in full below.