Album Review: A Firmer Hand by Hamish Hawk

Following 2021's Heavy Elevator and last year's Angel Numbers was sure to be no easy feat, but with A Firmer Hand Hamish Hawk has pulled off a hat-trick. The coyness of the previous albums left by the wayside, A Firmer Hand is utterly steeped in an authenticity and forwardness of the most soul-baring variety. Seamlessly woven throughout each and every track is a sense of heartfelt honesty, first taking the form of a charmingly gentle sincerity in opener Juliet as Epithet.

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Scottish star’s latest is a big, bold lesson in taking risks, and letting the mask drop when things threaten to get too arch Hamish Hawk has been hovering on the edges of the Scottish music scene for about a decade now, releasing two well-received albums and working with the likes of Idlewild and King Creosote. And while Hawk’s previous albums were good (his second, Angel Numbers, was shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year, after all), A Firmer Hand seems to mark a huge jump in quality. For while there was much to admire on Hawk’s first two records, there was also the nagging feeling that he was trying to push too much in there – cramming each song with enough clever-clever lyrical references to make your head spin, while we never learned much of Hawk the songwriter.

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Hamish Hawk has embraced his thirties with a vim and vigour that few familiar with his more tentative steps of the previous decade would recognise. 'A Firmer Hand' is his third album in three years and continues the momentum gathered by 2021's 'Heavy Elevator' and last year's 'Angel Numbers'. Having established himself as the perfect, introspective wordsmith for the lockdown-era, the subsequent years have seen his band fill larger venues and enjoy increasing acclaim.

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Hamish Hawk has the horn and he's not afraid to let you know it. The Edinburgh born and based artist’s previous albums Angel Numbers (2023) and Heavy Elevator (2021) were made up of erudite songwriting ideal for the Morrissey fan in your life who was unable to chisel the art from the increasingly reactionary and tedious artist. However well crafted, both records perhaps suffered from an overabundance in lyricism - 'Once Upon An Acid Glance', for instance, was a curiosity shop impossible to enter thanks to a door jammed with references to "Tiffany interiors", "Hockney ephemera", Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Britt Ekland and "Grand delusions only fit for Napoleon" - arguably all a little much.

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