Hamish Hawk announces new album ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’

Hamish Hawk | Photo credit: Jodie Mann

Edinburgh's Hamish Hawk returns today with news of a much-anticipated new album, ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’, the follow-up to 2024's queer-coded ‘A Firmer Hand’, an Album Of The Week at The Quietus and much-lauded elsewhere.

The 10-song ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’ is defined by two opposing, and often warring voices, that of Intriguer, remote, charismatic, aggressive and grandiose; and Tenderness, pliant, troubled and dewy-eyed. The album concerns the places they collide, and the sparks that fly when they do. The relationship is violent, and romantic, and within it there are seductions, infidelities, confessions and power games. The album as a result deals in lust, deceit, ambition, consent and pain.

To introduce these two opposing voices, Hamish Hawk is releasing a single from each today, the punk-funk strut of ‘Ice-like Empty’ and the synth driven, self-flagellating title track, ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’.

Intriguer sings ‘Ice-like Empty’, from a world of his own invention, one of arched eyebrows, pride and recklessness. The brazen frontman revels in his good fortune and notoriety, all the while cackling, poking fun at the adoring crowds. It's a cold, calculating kind of groove, and it just don’t quit.

‘Intriguer/Tenderness’ on the other hand is a song of pain, toil and mania. Tenderness has been so brutalised, so corrupted by Intriguer that when he falls out the other end of the spiral, he is speaking Intriguer’s words, dressed in his clothes.

In Hamish's words: "It’s a song that I’m immensely happy with; it was a catharsis, and one that helped me to understand where the album begins and ends, and its thematic limits."

Pre-order new album ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’ here

Listen to ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’ here

Listen to ‘Uce-like Empty’ here

Watch the videos for both singles below

The album will be available on CD, cassette, standard black LP, a limited coloured D2C LP, a Rough Trade exclusive variant and a highly limited Dinked edition. Signed prints will also accompany certain formats. View the full list of variants here.

In support of the new album, Hamish and his band will play the following of instore and out-store dates:

Friday 2nd April - Rough Trade East, London
Saturday 3rd April - Resident, Brighton
Sunday 4th April - Banquet, Kingston @ Circuit
Monday 5th April - Rough Trade, Bristol
Tuesday 6th April - Rough Trade, Nottingham
Wednesday 7th April - Jacaranda Baltic, Liverpool
Thursday 8th April - Crash, Leeds @ Wardrobe
Thursday 22nd April - Assai, Glasgow @ Saint Lukes
Friday 23rd April - Assai, Edinburgh @ La Belle Angele
Saturday 24th April - Assai, Aberdeen @ The Tunnels

Tickets are on sale here.

More information on ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’:

Since he first saw himself reflected as Intriguer and Tenderness in the mirror of his songs, Hawk has come to a deeper understanding of what they mean to him. “Both have been exacerbated by my life performing under my own name,” he says. “There's the person on stage and the person off stage; the domestic person and this other larger than life, fired up version of myself.” Tenderness, he feels “in some ways in the face of the performance is kind of diminished by that. The relationship involves lies and deceit and notions of consent and pain and discomfort, triumph and failure, guilt and shame.”

The harsh dialogue between the Intriguer and Tenderness aspects to Hawk’s personality makes this just as violent and intense an album as its predecessor. Where on ‘A Firmer Hand’ he almost revelled in the oozing and confident sexuality, ‘Intriguer / Tenderness’ has ended up feeling a lot more excoriating in its self-reflection. “It's actually quite scary to see what I say to myself,” Hawk admits, adding that the process of committing those words to lyricism can feel like an act of self-cruelty. “The stories you say in your own head to yourself are shocking if your inner monologue is really as mean-spirited as mine is. With a song like ‘Tuscan Kind’, I just can't believe the criticisms I've levelled against myself and insults I've hurled in my own direction. When you're alone in a sealed room that is your own mind, it's crazy what comes out of the dark to sting you, the weapons you can invent to beat yourself with.” This is reflected in the air of malevolent threat throughout the record, especially on the simple drum machine pulse of ‘Mother Of Vinegar’, with lyrics about being in a south-facing psychiatric ward – a reference to Hawk’s living room in which he wrote it in a frantic session at a really difficult time. “It was in the deepest part of the worst of it,” Hawk says, “If you imagine it like a big crater, and it's just right at the bottom.” Throughout the album there are references to snakes and infants, the former a manifestation of the Intriguer side to Hawk’s character, the latter the tenderness. Much as the snake in the garden of Eden in the Bible story of Genesis corrupted Eve, so the dynamic on the album highlights some of the ambiguity of Haw’s relationship with himself.

In the past, some have been confused by Hawk’s sharp lyricism, broad vocabulary and cultural references, believing it to be an arch affectation. The violence of language on ‘Intriguer/Tenderness’, along with its predecessor, ought to put this misapprehension to bed – there can be little crueller yet honest as an inner critic that can write as well as the Neil Tennant-approved Hamish Hawk. These are deeply human records, of cold sweat, hot saliva, lust and fear. Hawk admits that he dislikes being described as a “literary” songwriter, feeling that label obscures the directness of his songs. His lyrical palette comes from a lifelong fascination with language. He’s less interested in the musicians who might have influenced him than how his inspiration also comes from books, things he hears kids say, or watching ‘Coronation Street’, eavesdropping, and especially on this record, the vivid imagery from his dreams. Hawk says that far from being wilfully verbose, this rich palette is exploited purely for clarity, even if, as is the case here, his lyrics are an act of violence against himself.  Indeed, it’s Hawk’s distinctive use of – and most importantly pleasure in – language that makes intriguer and tenderness (as characters, as songs, as an album), really come to life. “I really shy away from lyrics that aren't immediate,” he says. “I don't mind a complexity of ideas, grappling with strange themes, getting down there, and getting gnarly.”  

Gnarly just about sums it up. “Every so often I write a song and I feel a bit confronted by it,” Hawk says. “I even worry about sending it to the band, because sometimes you just feel a bit safer withholding. But then I've pretty much never allowed myself to do that.” During the writing process of the record, Hawk’s guitarist Andrew Pearson picked up on how “nobody seems to be getting on in this album”. He considers the strange revelation of a record that sets himself against himself, and that he thought was different from its predecessor in having higher peaks of lightness, even if the troughs were darker. Now with the release looming, he wonders if it isn’t actually even more intensely heavy than ‘A Firmer Hand’. And if so, what next? “That’s the question – you've got all that out there, but surely the next thing you say has got to be a kinder thing, you know?” he says, “I don't know when the light comes.”

Read full bio here

Hamish Hawk
Intriguer / Tenderness
Out April 2nd
via So Recordings
Pre-Order

Tracklisting:

Side A

Isn't
Intriguer/Tenderness
Ice-like Empty
Ego in Lotus
Half of Paris

Side B

Thirsty Girl
Mother of Vinegar
Oyster
The Tuscan Kind
Ashes, and Then Some