{"id":774926,"date":"2026-07-02T06:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/774926\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T06:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:45:09","slug":"hammok-when-does-this-place-become-our-scene-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/774926\/","title":{"rendered":"Hammok: When Does This Place Become Our Scene Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every song Hammok<\/a> write\u2014whether it takes the form of clanking noise-rock, hurtling post-hardcore, or punk ripped straight from the chest and then dismantled in its own distortion\u2014is made to be heard in a mosh pit. The Norwegian trio\u2019s debut EP, however, was forced to<\/a> act out those motions in absentia; singer-guitarist Tobias Osland, bassist Ole Benjamin Thomassen, and drummer Ferdinand Aasheim formed the band during the era of COVID lockdowns. Four years later and now settled into their second album, When Does This Place Become Our Scene, the Norwegian musicians should feel euphoric tearing through their music in live settings. But as the album attests, escaping containment isn\u2019t necessarily the same as attaining freedom if you\u2019re met with a reality where the local music scene dissipated, fraudulent metrics are standard, and countries normalize genocide.<\/p>\n

Hammok pack the album with the claustrophobia of their pandemic origins and the maniacal energy of their recent tours, forcing the two head to head to provoke the senses with overwhelming noise. Their guitars bite at the air like a guard dog snarling at intruders at the first whiff of their presence. Before Osland even lays out his grievances on opener \u201cThe Scene,\u201d he lets out a tortured howl that rips through the air like pain personified, wedging itself into a distinct, unforgettable octave. \u201cSit the fuck down\/Get your guard down\/Let us get it together,\u201d he screams. Suddenly you\u2019re cross-legged on the grass and awaiting his next orders.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

When Does This Place Become Our Scene is billed as a call for cultivating your own community, and while Hammok do crave a robust music scene in Oslo, they don\u2019t speak in didactic phrases or build moral goalposts to get there. In practice, they operate similarly to Mclusky<\/a> or their Norwegian neighbors Honningbarna<\/a> by anchoring the bass up front and hammering confrontational lyrics in fragments of fury. A bluesy guitar riff on slow number \u201cTap Water\u201d lends a dark humor to Osland\u2019s laments about how depression has robbed him of the thrills of self-immolation. Aasheim\u2019s blistering drumming on \u201cCND\u201d accelerates the protagonist\u2019s paranoid thoughts about the weight of expectations and gorging himself on creatine. Written after Hammok criticized \u00d8ya Festival\u2019s ownership for dismissing<\/a> the power of boycotts and were swiftly reprimanded<\/a> after stepping offstage, \u201cBANG\u201d morphs from a heavy bounce into an onslaught of noise-rock pummeling; for a minute straight, Osland repeatedly screams \u201cSold a war\/Profit\/Then it\u2019s old\u201d until his throat is raw. That\u2019s the trick those bands passed down to Hammok: pulsate with brash post-hardcore until it becomes downright intoxicating on its own.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, as Hammok ride a continuous, albeit thrashing, hook, Osland clocks in for an extra shift, turning to production techniques to amplify the band\u2019s emotional edge. The final stretch of \u201cGooning for Free\u201d blows out the volume in half-second bursts, like solar flares of noise lashing outwards to singe the speaker at random intervals; after steadying \u201cThirst\u201d with a barrel-scraping bassline and stiff downbeats on a tom-tom, Osland layers distortion and fuzz over his guitar until the texture is perverse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every song Hammok write\u2014whether it takes the form of clanking noise-rock, hurtling post-hardcore, or punk ripped straight from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-774926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}