Hammock Share New Double Single: ‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’ / ‘Sadness’
Hammock by Eric Ryan Anderson
Hammock have shared a new double single, the album's title track, ‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’, alongside ‘Sadness’, offering two further windows into the Nashville duo's most ambitious and personal record to date.
Listen to ‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’ here
Listen to ‘Sadness’ here
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, or as their listeners tend to put it, loud Hammock or quiet Hammock. These two new tracks illuminate something of the full breadth of that range, sitting at opposite ends of the album's vast emotional landscape.
‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’ is the record's longest and most calmly commanding piece, a slow, immersive ascent built from layered guitars, choral textures and drifting tones that embodies the album's central image: the moment a moonrise is mistaken for something far more cataclysmic. ‘Sadness’, by contrast, is something more measured and constant - a drum pattern anchoring the track from early on, holding steady as the music drifts and merges around it. It moves slowly and deliberately from a place of quiet melancholy and nostalgia, building not in force but in feeling, until it arrives somewhere close to euphoria.
The album's title and its thematic core emerge from a formative night in Byrd's youth. Under the influence of LSD, he and a friend - their imaginations shaped by a fundamentalist upbringing - became briefly convinced they were witnessing the Rapture. The light in the sky, he soon realised, was simply the moon rising. That moment of misapprehension and the quiet revelation that followed became the record's beating heart.
"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?"
Bandleader Marc Byrd said a few words on each single. On the album's title track ‘The Second Coming Was A Moonrise’, he said: "This track takes some twists & turns, much like a psychedelic experience I had with a friend in my younger days. Being raised religious fundamentalists we mistook a moonrise shining from behind some hills for what we thought was the second coming of Christ. Enjoy the trip."
Speaking on ‘Sadness’, Byrd says: "There’s something profound about the simplicity of both the music and title of this track. Like an audio summary of what we’ve sounded like through the years… A throwback as well as a continuation of moving forward… Like a sadness we get used to, yet still push through."
The Second Coming Was A Moonrise arrives 22nd May via Hammock's own label. Self-produced and mixed once again by longtime collaborator Emery Dobyns, the ten-track album moves across compositions that evoke deep space drift and emotional gravity in equal measure, from the vast sweep of ‘Everything You Love Is Buried In The Ground Or Scattered Into Space’ to the intimate, hallucinatory vocal piece ‘Chemicals Make You Small’, featuring Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Further contributions come from Matt Kidd (Slow Meadow), Matthew Doty (Deserta), Christine Byrd (Lumenette), Chad Howat, and Jake Finch.
Reflecting on where the album sits in their body of work, 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."
Pre-order/pre-save The Second Coming Was A Moonrise here
Hammock are:
Marc Byrd & Andrew Thompson
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