Hammock release new album ‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’
Hammock
Praise for Hammock and The Second Coming Was A Moonrise
“The Second Coming Was a Moonrise is Hammock in their own lane, painting in colours that are as vibrant as ever.” - Boolin Tunes
"These songs evoke a universal feeling of vastness and connectedness." - Hi-Fi News
"Hammock have been shimmering majestically at the midpoint between dreamy post-rock and surreal disorientating ambience for two decades, and "The Second Coming Was A Moonrise" is a manifestly superior example of the form" - Prog
"immense depth and sonic exploration has been poured into their beautiful, hopeful, grandiose new album." - Rock Sound
"dark, aching, instrumental" - Stereogum
"Atmospheric" - Uncut
Hammock have today released their new album, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise, out now via Hammock Music.
Stream/Buy The Second Coming Was A Moonrise here
The Nashville duo's latest work continues a two-decade trajectory of expansive, atmospheric compositions that move between ambient minimalism and cinematic scale. Self-produced and mixed by longtime collaborator Emery Dobyns, the ten-track album unfolds across compositions that evoke deep space drift and emotional gravity, from the vast sweep of "Everything You Love Is Buried In The Ground Or Scattered Into Space" to the slow, immersive ascent of the title track, one of the record's longest and most calmly commanding pieces.
Now over twenty years into their collaboration, Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson continue to refine a sound that resists easy classification. "Beatless ambient, post-rock, shoegaze, neoclassical," says Byrd, noting the tags often applied to their work. "Or as some of our listeners call it, loud Hammock or quiet Hammock. What all our work has in common is a distinctive sonic blueprint."
The Second Coming Was A Moonrise extends that blueprint into new territory, at once one of their most intimate releases and one of their most expansive. The album's title and its thematic core emerge from a formative moment in Byrd's youth. One night, under the influence of LSD, he and a friend became convinced they were witnessing the Rapture, their imagination shaped by their fundamentalist upbringing. The light in the sky, he later realised, was simply the moon rising.
"If anyone grew up a fundamentalist, maybe this album can be a soundtrack for letting go of toxic shame and bad religion, while holding onto what is good, beautiful and true," Byrd explains. "Seeing and experiencing a moonrise is a miracle in itself. How many times do we miss what's there or what's being said by someone because we assume something else is happening?"
As has often been the case with Hammock's work, much of The Second Coming Was A Moonrise is instrumental, built from layered guitars, choral textures, and drifting tones, though always with titles chosen with intent. When words do surface, they land with sharpened force. "Like Sinking Stars" draws from Thompson's experience of a tornado striking his home and studio, while "Chemicals Make You Small", the album's most vocal-led moment, is an intimate, hallucinatory reflection on dislocation and emotional overwhelm, featuring Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Coyne's unmistakable voice drifts through lines of quiet unease, tracing the fragile space between memory and perception, while Drozd's contributions on keys deepen the track's spectral, immersive quality.
Further contributions come from longtime collaborators Christine Byrd (Lumenette), Matt Kidd (Slow Meadow), Matthew Doty (Deserta), Chad Howat, and Jake Finch.
Reflecting on the album, Byrd describes it as "a combination of what we've done through the years, with maybe a little more solidity" - shaped by personal change and a wider sense of global disquiet. "So much is missed and looked over due to the tunnel vision created by politics, social media, algorithms, silos of misinformation, and perpetual distraction," he says. "I would hope this could be an album that sounds like sitting on the roof of a car, when being young was serious, and one night was like the end of the world. In a way, it's the same old Hammock, but new, and maybe even incautious."
The Second Coming Was A Moonrise is out now via Hammock Music.
Stream/Buy here
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Marc Byrd & Andrew Thompson
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