The Second Coming Was A Moonrise is Hammock’s upcoming album. And it is yet another progression in the duo’s twenty year expedition through powerful, emotion-evoking music. It includes work that features Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd. The album combines close vocals with the duo’s sprawling cinematic soundscapes. Within the 10 tracks that make it up the album hovers between ambient sonics and emotional as well as reflective narrative. Ultimately it reaffirms Hammock as a band whose music is both ethereal and deeply human.
According to a press release from Hammock’s management, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise is due out on May 22nd.
In the meantime, the duo has shared two new tracks, including “Chemicals Make You Small”, featuring Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd.
The Nashville duo’s latest work continues a two-decade trajectory of expansive, atmospheric compositions that move between ambient minimalism and cinematic scale. Alongside “Chemicals Make You Small”, they also unveil “The Unsetting Sun”, a slow-building piece that reflects the album’s more meditative and immersive qualities.
“Chemicals Make You Small” stands as one of the album’s rare vocal-led moments – an intimate, hallucinatory reflection on dislocation and emotional overwhelm. Coyne’s unmistakable voice drifts through lines of quiet unease, tracing the fragile space between memory and perception, while Drozd’s contributions on keys deepen the track’s spectral, immersive quality.
Now over twenty years into their collaboration, Byrd and Thompson continue to refine a sound that resists easy classification. “Beatless ambient, post-rock, shoegaze, neoclassical”, Byrd says, noting the tags often applied to their work. “Or as some of our listeners call it, loud Hammock or quiet Hammock. What all our work has in common is a distinctive sonic blueprint.”
The Second Coming Was A Moonrise extends that blueprint into new territory, at once one of their most intimate releases and one of their most expansive. Self-produced and mixed once again by long-time collaborator Emery Dobyns, the album unfolds across ten compositions that evoke a sense of deep space drift and emotional gravity, from the vast sweep of “Everything You Love Is Buried In The Ground Or Scattered Into Space” to the slow ascent of “The Unsetting Sun.”
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The album’s title and its thematic core, emerges from a formative moment in Byrd’s youth. One night, under the influence of LSD, he and a friend became convinced they were witnessing the Rapture, their imagination shaped by their fundamentalist upbringing. The light in the sky, he later realised, was simply the moon rising.
“If anyone grew up a fundamentalist, maybe this album can be a soundtrack for letting go of toxic shame and bad religion, while holding onto what is good, beautiful and true,” Byrd explains. “Seeing and experiencing a moonrise is a miracle in itself. How many times do we miss what’s there or what’s being said by someone because we assume something else is happening?”
As with much of Hammock’s work, language is used sparingly but deliberately. Much of the album remains instrumental, built from layered guitars, choral textures, and drifting tones, but when words surface, they land with sharpened intent. Elsewhere, “Like Sinking Stars” draws from Thompson’s experience of a tornado striking his home and studio.
Across the album, additional contributions come from longtime collaborators, including Christine Byrd (Lumenette), Matt Kidd (Slow Meadow), Matthew Doty (Deserta), Chad Howat, and Jake Finch.
It all adds up to a body of work that continues Hammock’s singular ability to balance weight and lightness, music that feels at once grounded and otherworldly, intimate and immense.
Reflecting on the album, Byrd describes it as “a combination of what we’ve done through the years, with maybe a little more solidity”, shaped by both personal change and a wider sense of global disquiet.
“So much is missed and looked over due to the tunnel vision created by politics, social media, algorithms, silos of misinformation, and perpetual distraction,” he says. “I would hope this could be an album that sounds like sitting on the roof of a car, when being young was serious, and one night was like the end of the world. In a way, it’s the same old Hammock, but new, and maybe even incautious.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source livemusicblog.com ’
