Back in May, we wrote about how Hemlock Ernst—Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring—was teaming up with producer Icky Reels for brand new album, Studying Absence. “The record sees Herring swap the typical jazz and soul beats of the Hemlock Ernst sound for Icky Reels’s industrial sensibilities and forces his most ambitious record to date,” as we described. “One loaded with all the history and ghosts of the South, that which happened and what might have been.” First single and album opener ‘Raised in the South’ introduced the sound, an amalgamation of all the love and emptiness which constitutes Herring’s past, be they tactile experiences woven into his very DNA or stories so distant they come to sound like myths or dreams.
The Hemlock Ernst partnership came about after Herring did a feature for the Beans album, Venga, and provided an opportunity to work outside of established styles. “After we did the song and the record came out, Beans hit me back and said he thought I should do a full project with Icky,” Herring explains. “He thought that I really needed to challenge myself, that it would bring something out in me. Beans and his group Anti-Pop Consortium were and are heroes of mine. ‘Tragic Epilogue’ by APC is one of the most influential records in my life. To get that kind of attention and push from Beans was huge, but I didn’t know how I felt about the idea at the time. I saw it as exactly that, a challenge.”
A variety of collaborators join to make this challenge a little easier, with Fatboi Sharif, Egyptian Lover and aforementioned Beans all lending their talents across the record. Latest single ‘Remains’ see EUCLID of Armand Hammer join the fray, a track of cold, dystopic beats which highlights both the intensity and lonely weight of Herring’s delivery, as well as the nocturnal atmosphere in which it moves. “It’s foolish attempting to paint the night as anything more than the absence of light,” the opening lines suggest, but Hemlock Ernst is taking you by the hand to lead you through all the same.
