Dan Hillier
The second record from the Edinburgh bruisers, Trapped as as blunt as the tool Hammer take their namesake from. However, that’s not to say that it’s as dull or dim in the slightest. Such adjectives are pretty much antonymous with this record in fact.
Here, Hammer take the cartwheeling riffs of The Black Dahlia Murder, the feral mania of Celestial Sanctuary, the visceral nature of Vomit Forth and the inherent sense of daft fun synonymous with all three bands and slap it all together in a manner that’s playful yet forceful. Stabbing, ceaseless and sharp, if Hammer where to take their another name from things found in the garden shed following this release, perhaps a more fitting name for them would be ‘sabre saw’. It’s certainly powerful enough to take your arm off, or at least cause some right gory damage.
With Trapped released today independently, we got in touch with guitarist and record engineer Adam Poustie to break down the record, track by track.
This one’s been our live opener for a good while now, so it just made sense to have it open the album! It’s eclectic riff wise for sure – I started with the chorus riff and worked my way back. I really wanted that breakdown to have a proper groove as well before going back to the intense, black metal inspired end.
Lyrically this song’s kind of about organised religion and my own personal problems with it. Kind of framed through the betterment of self in service to a higher power and the kind of struggling with wanting to want to be better as opposed to actually wanting it. It kind of follows that crisis of faith to an end point – at least how I rationalise it.
I promise we wrote this one way before the Gojira song of the same name was revealed! As psyched as I was by their Olympics performance in the back of my mind I was like ‘ah shit’ haha.
In the end we just stuck with the name, we already thought of it with that title and couldn’t detach them in our heads.
This one’s been a live staple for a good while, and seems to be an audience favourite, so we’re really excited to get it out there for people.
We tuned our bottom string way down to drop F# for that horrible chunk on the low end, and to kind of keep things with that up and down ebb and flow, there’s some pretty manic guitar lines on the higher register in the chorus. I feel like having that up and down really makes the ‘down’ hit harder.
The big bass drop on the second chorus is great. Originally our bassist Piotr had a big slide there and we all liked it so much Kris Kournavos – who mixed the album – added a full bass drop underneath.
Lyrically this one’s super schlocky – we’re all big horror movie fans so I wrote basically a little short horror story, as the song name suggests. Recording vocals was really fun for this – lots of layered screaming and general gutteral noise from our vocalist, Jim. We kind of went back and forth on the cough at the end but both liked it as a full stop to the song, so we decided to keep it in.
This one’s brand new – we’ve never played it live before the album releases. A short one that never lets up, after trapped kind of unravels at the end we wanted to kick right back into intense riffs.
Lyrics wise I’ve always been a fan of the imagery of tarot cards, so this one’s lifted straight from the meaning behind the card ‘the hanged man’.
Keith, our drummer, has a great sort of revolving beat on the first riff of this song. I love the way it cycles round and resolves itself – which also fits with the theme of the song.
That initial riff also has a great switch up from Piotr. When recording we found a really punky baseline that drove the tune a little harder, it really opens up the riff when it kicks in on the second repetition.
This tune follows a kind of detective/horror story of someone hunting a cannibal – I often write tunes as little stories, mostly based on titles or a handful of words I initially write.
This has a little bit in it at the kind of middle 8 that cycles round in an odd meter – I forget the time signature it ended up being in but sorting a followable click was a bit of a process, as we were so used to just playing it by feel.
The ending of the song has a little section of the drums alone – when we originally performed this song it had other instruments still play but we loved the beat Keith was playing so decided to just cut everything out for a second to make the end a little more sonically diverse.
Our first single from the album, this one’s about the thought experiment Roko’s Basilisk – which as an actual thought experiment doesn’t really hold any water, but a person dedicating their life to creating a malevolent A.I just so it doesn’t punish them for not doing so was a fun idea as a horror story. Real Harlan Ellison vibes.
Structurally this one’s a real riff vehicle, probably the most ‘acrobatic’ riff wise on the album. A lot of our music plays heavily on chromatic kind of shifts in angular ways which is on full display here. On top of that it’s got a real bounce to a lot of the sections which makes it really fun to play live.
This one was basically the first tune we wrote as a band. Dave, our guitar player, brought in the riff and the tune developed from there. It’s interesting to me how close this tune has stayed to the original riff, but there have been some refinements over time for sure. This is our go to soundcheck song so it’s probably the tune of ours I’ve heard the most – still not tired of it which is hopefully a good sign.
Lyrically it uses the traditional legend of the Golem to talk about realising when something’s not working and being able to step away from it, or take what does work about it and making something out of that. When the golem is created, it doesn’t work, and this song is about the creators frustration/salvaging of that situation. It was specifically about writer’s block, which I had pretty bad when I tried to write the lyrics originally, ironically – but I hope the sentiment can kind of be applied to whatever.
As soon as we had our albums worth of tunes, we knew this would close things out. Though it’s not something we do live, I could see that fade out at the end in my mind from the get go and had to do it.
The main/opening riff was written by Dave, and he initially didn’t bring it up as he wasn’t sure if he liked it. As soon as he did play it for us we convinced him to use it. The chorus riff was initially a totally different song of it’s own I wasn’t really happy with, so I kinda cannibalised what did work and we brought those ideas together in one tune.
This one’s a real simple one lyrically – another short horror sorry about someone crawling out of a mass grave – full death metal. The fade out at the end has another great moment from Jim – I’m a big fan of a good ‘blegh’ and Jim nailed it right at the end. Really pleased me that that’s what ends the whole album.