Hammock have released their new album, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise, out now via Hammock Music.
The ten-track record continues the Nashville duo’s long-running blend of ambient minimalism and cinematic, post-rock scale. Self-produced by Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson and mixed by longtime collaborator Emery Dobyns, it moves from the expansive sweep of ‘Everything You Love Is Buried In The Ground Or Scattered Into Space’ to the long-form, slowly ascending title track.
The album’s title and theme stem from a formative moment in Byrd’s youth, when a moonrise was mistaken for an apocalyptic event — an idea that shapes the record’s focus on perception, fear, and release from inherited shame.
Primarily instrumental, the album is built from layered guitars, choral textures, and drifting tones, with select vocal moments. ‘Like Sinking Stars’ draws on Thompson’s experience of a tornado hitting his home and studio, while the vocal-led ‘Chemicals Make You Small’ features Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Additional contributors include Christine Byrd (Lumenette), Matt Kidd (Slow Meadow), Matthew Doty (Deserta), Chad Howat, and Jake Finch.
To mark the release, we’ve asked Hammock to share three of their main influences behind The Second Coming Was A Moonrise as part of our Under the Influence feature.
The Flaming Lips – American Head
This isn’t necessarily a musical influence on our album, but more of a connection with the overall theme/story that runs through American Head. Our album title, The Second Coming Was a Moonrise is about the time a friend of mine and myself, (both of us raised strict fundamentalists) mistook a moonrise for the second coming of Jesus because we were tripping on acid. My friend freaked out. But when we realized it was just the moon rising and not horse riding Jesus galloping across the sky, we knew we would live to see another day. (This is in no way a promotion of drug use).
We just really connected with how American Head delved into the way drug use can back fire and destroy… not only for the individual using drugs, but also the devastation it has on the rest of the family and/or friends. Like Wayne, I very briefly sold a little weed, I worked at a chain restaurant, I had friends who were on drugs and decided to turn their headlights off while they were driving at night and ended up wrapping their car around a tree and dying. The Lips are from Oklahoma City, we’re from Arkansas and Tennessee. All of these similarities led to us reaching out to the Lips and asking if they wanted to collaborate on our song, ‘Chemicals Make You Small’. That particular lyric captured a real moment when a friend of mine was in the back seat thinking he was gonna die because of the drugs he was on. We had some correspondence with Wayne through Instagram, so we thought we’d just ask if they wanted to collaborate. They did way more than we asked them to do. We’re so grateful. We wish both of them nothing but love and light.
Deserta – Every Moment, Everything You Need
We loved this album so much we hired the mastermind behind Deserta, Matthew Doty to play synths and a couple of guitars on The Second Coming. Deserta may even end up being a backing band for us in the future… Yep, I said it. This album is dense in all the ways we love and appreciate. Is there too much reverb on the vocal? Are the the vocals too wet on this album? Don’t be ridiculous. Those are silly questions. Absolutely not. ‘I’m So Tired’ makes me feel like a doomed youth in love and ‘Goodbye Vista’ makes me feel like I’m a seventeen year old lost soul, with that ineffable ache of teen angst.
Midwife – No Depression In Heaven
This album has a mood and a theme that presses in on the listener with a sense of impermanence. The way Madeline Johnston uses vocal effects influenced the way we recorded Christine Byrd’s (my wife) vocals. The places where the string noise(s) from the guitar can be heard echoing in the delays influenced us to keep the rawness of the guitar track in the first half of ‘The Unsetting Sun’. And the overall audio haze of No Depression In Heaven can be heard in our choice to keep the thick distorted cloudiness so prevalent in our next to the last song, ‘Deconstruction’.
