• News

• All

Jun 13, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Simon Murphy

Scottish musician Hamish Hawk is releasing a new album, A Firmer Hand, on August 16 via Fierce Panda. Now he has shared its second single, “Nancy Dearest,” via a music video. Watch it below.

Hawk had this to say about the song in a press release: “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.”

Previously Hawk shared the album’s first single, “Big Cat Tattoos,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week.

A Firmer Hand is the follow-up to 2023’s Angel Numbers.

Hawk had this to say about the album: “Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out. The thing that links all of the songs is a sense of the unsaid, whether out of guilt, shame, repression, embarrassment, coyness, whatever it might have been. I realized: I am going to say these things, and not all of them are going to make me look good. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.

“Once I’d given myself over to the idea, I thought, I have to stick to this. I can’t hide anything from it. I can’t clean it all up for consumption. It felt uncomfortable for me – and that’s exactly how it should feel. That’s a really strong position.”

Read our 2022 interview with Hamish Hawk.

Read our review of Angel Numbers.

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.