Hamish Hawk, Billy Nomates with support from Cloth

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“Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out.” In a café just around the corner from his Edinburgh flat, Hamish Hawk is contemplating his extraordinary new record, A Firmer Hand. “The thing that links all of the songs is a sense of the unsaid, whether out of guilt, shame, repression, embarrassment, coyness, whatever it might have been. I realised: I am going to say these things, and not all of them are going to make me look good. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.” A Firmer Hand is the third in a run of superlative Hamish Hawk albums which began in 2021 with Heavy Elevator, and continued last year with Angel Numbers. Hawk has been making music with serious intent since 2014, when he self-released Aznavour as Hamish James Hawk. Championed early on by King Creosote and Idlewild, the following year he recorded the 10-inch Mull EP before forming Hamish Hawk & The New Outfit, a unit which morphed into his current band.

If there’s one question that informs Tor Maries writing as Billy Nomates more than any other it’s this: whose voice isn’t in the room? A beacon of brutal truth in an industry built on inconsequential bullshit, the Bristol-based singer-songwriter gives voice to the silenced, the disillusioned, the broken-hearted, and the burnt-out, assembling brilliantly biting dispatches from the fringes of a society mired in austerity, inequality and insularity. Or, as Maries puts it, with trademark bluntness, “There's too much music in the world already, so everything I make has to count.”

Support comes from Cloth - twins Rachael and Paul Swinton from Glasgow. Produced by Ali Chant (Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey, Yard Act), their new album Pink Silence comes after the band shared 2024 single ‘Polaroid’, their first new music since the release of their acclaimed and Scottish Album Of The Year Award nominated 2023 album for Rock Action, Secret Measure.

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