Edinburgh indie rock/chamber pop/alt artist Hamish Hawk has released his new single “Nancy Dearest“, alongside a video.
The track is taken from his upcoming new album “A Firmer Hand“, set to arrive on August 16th via So Recordings. Pre-order your copy here.
Rich of voice and even richer of imagination, Hawk creates musical pen-portraits, chamber pop songs that have swallowed both a dictionary and a compendium of modern urban (and island) fairy tales. And Hawk does all this with considerable wit, inspired by artists like Leonard Cohen, Jarvis Cocker, Randy Newman and Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields.
Fresh from a solo tour across Europe in support of Villagers, and following the playful first single “Big Cat Tattoos”, today Hamish shares a further album highlight in the grandoise, anthemic “Nancy Dearest”.
He had the following to say about the song:
“Many of the songs on A Firmer Hand are marked by the presence of another: a lover, an authority figure, an enemy, or a confidante. Nancy Dearest is defined instead by an absence. On the one hand, it’s a bitterly defiant song, an ego trip, a narcissistic flight of fancy. On the other, it’s a song about sheer loneliness, isolation, and ultimate loss. Either way, it’s a cry for help. We all tell ourselves stories about who we are and who we are not. On occasion something will cause our visions of ourselves to short-circuit. In Nancy Dearest, our hero is spiralling. “I’ve seen the well of emptiness and I have had my fill.” Tell me about it, stud.“
Watch /listen below.
A Firmer Hand Tracklisting:
- Juliet as Epithet
- Machiavelli’s Room
- Big Cat Tattoos
- Nancy Dearest
- Autobiography of Spy
- You Can Film Me
- Christopher St.
- Men Like Wire
- Questionable Hit
- Disingenuous
- Milk an Ending
- The Hard Won
Photo by Simon Murphy
