PICTURES: GAUI H
Stationed on an island 40 miles south of the Faroe Islands’ main landmass, Streymoy, the tiny, shore-clinging hamlet of Sandvik is home to two monuments to seafaring peril.
Standing over the slate-rock western bay is a broad stone cross in honour of 10thcentury Christian Viking chief Sigmundur Brestisson, who swam from a distant shipwreck to shore, only to be immediately beheaded by a local for his gold armband. Five hundred yards down the road, overlooked by a daunting, grey-green wall of mountain jutting out into a wind-whipped aquamarine fjord, is a fenced-off gravestone, erected in honour of 14 sailors who lost their lives on their return from a whaling expedition in 1915.
On the black sands where the villagers witnessed their loved ones being overtaken by the waves, Hamferð keyboardist Esmar Joensen is recounting the horrors of the latter disaster and the reverberations that persist more than a century later. It’s the subject of his band’s latest album, Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk (‘But God’s Hand Is Strong’). “Of the two ships that went down,” he explains, “only one sailor survived. He was pulled out of the sea on a rope, and they found the body of his son ensnared at the end of it. Entire bloodlines were wiped out, but his daughter’s still alive. She’s 93, and she still lives just up the road from here.”
The son of local sheep farmers, Esmar is combination of bookishness and sturdy inner stillness as he recounts the story with the gravity of a personal witness. Growing up here in Sandvik, he was always drawn to this spot, staring out across the sea and wondering how its elemental, capricious nature could be translated into sound.
The answer turned out to be Hamferð themselves, one of the most transformative bands to have emerged from the metal underground in recent memory.
Hamferð – pronounced Hamferth with the softest of ‘th’s, the name a folkloric word for the ghosts of loved ones lost at sea – were formed in 2008, amidst a tiny local metal scene where only Viking/folk metallers Týr were gaining international attention or exploring indigenous themes. Initially inspired by My Dying Bride, and habitually bedecked in Faroese funeral suits, they’ve managed to transmute the fairly niche realms of death- and funeral doom into the kind of oh-mygod-have-you-heard-this, word-of-mouth experience that transcends genre trappings.
That’s in no small part down to frontman Jón Aldará’s astonishing vocals, ranging from deep growl to heart-rending tenor as though he’s been stricken by divine ordinance to give voice to humankind’s existential plight. The video for the band’s exquisite 2015 track, Deyðir Varðar, featured them upon a Faroese mountaintop during a solar eclipse. It was a moment of spectacular, soul’s-journey synergy that’s garnered 500K YouTube views and reams of awed testimony often equating it to a religious experience.
Across an extended debut EP, Vilst Er Síðsta Fet, and two albums, Hamferð have become to the Faroe Islands what soon-to-be-tourmates Sólstafir have become to their native Iceland, giving voice to both remote, alien landscapes and deep, emotional contours for which the most core-shaking of responses is one of recognition.