Hailing from Gothenburg, Sweden,
Hollow Ship are a psych-rock combo with a progressive edge and a penchant for big, ferocious grooves. The project stems from a collaboration between bandleader Thomas Frank (vocals, guitar) and Vincent Vensal (guitar) whose loose improvisations came to life over a two-year period with the addition of an agile rhythm battery in bassist Johannes Cronquist and drummer Mårten Magnefors. On their debut album,
Future Remains, the group invests in the exploratory spirit of psych, jam, prog, and art-rock without necessarily bowing to each tradition's expected tropes. In fact, their bold, rhythm-heavy attack and warped fusion of contemporary and vintage studio manipulations comes across as quite modern in approach. With its distorted kalimbas and massive tape-delayed drum hits, opener "We Were Kings" rolls through raucous layers of Afro-pop and dub while closer "Take Off" incorporates a muscular hip-hop-adjacent beats, hard funk bass licks, and a shimmering top layer that all comes together in an irresistible head-bobbing jam sandwich. In between,
Hollow Ship makes visits to the hissing pastoral fields of late-'60s acoustic psych ("Built to Last"), chunky hard rock ("In the End"), and behemoth prog romps ("Magic Mountain"), sometimes adding lyrics and sometimes just working up a rich instrumental lather. As musicians, they are all monster players who clearly gel as a live band and the whole affair is recorded with a robust, bottom-heavy analog punch that keeps the instruments on equal footing and prevents
Future Remains from becoming too hairy a guitar fest. For the most part, the songwriting is strong enough to hold its own, but for
Hollow Ship, the main attraction seems to be the bold feel of the arrangements, the musical interplay between bandmates, and the excellent production on this exciting debut. ~ Timothy Monger