Edinburgh songwriter Hamish Hawk announces his new album Intriguer / Tenderness, due for release on 2nd April via SO Recordings, alongside two new songs that introduce the contrasting personalities at the heart of his most ambitious and introspective work to date.
Hamish Hawk
The ten-track album follows 2024’s A Firmer Hand, but takes Hawk’s exploration of identity, desire and self-perception into considerably darker territory. Intriguer / Tenderness is built around two opposing voices: Intriguer, remote, charismatic, aggressive and grandiose, and Tenderness, pliant, troubled and vulnerable.
Rather than existing as straightforward alter egos, the two characters represent conflicting aspects of Hawk himself and the tension between the person who performs under his own name and the person who exists away from the stage.
That conflict provides the album’s central dramatic force. Across Intriguer / Tenderness, the relationship between the two personalities becomes increasingly volatile, touching on lust, deceit, ambition, consent, guilt, shame and pain. Seductions, infidelities, confessions and power games all become part of an internal dialogue in which neither side appears capable of completely overcoming the other.
To introduce those two voices, Hawk releases two songs simultaneously. Ice-Like Empty arrives as a punk-funk strut driven by a cold, swaggering groove. Sung from the perspective of Intriguer, it presents a character intoxicated by pride, notoriety and the attention of an audience. There is humour within the bravado, but also something calculating and unsettling beneath the surface as the character revels in his own mythology.
The title track, Intriguer / Tenderness, takes the opposite route. Synth-driven and deeply self-reflective, it follows Tenderness through pain, toil and mania after being so thoroughly corrupted by Intriguer that the distinction between the two begins to collapse.
For Hawk, the song became a key to understanding the album itself. “It’s a song that I’m immensely happy with; it was a catharsis, and one that helped me to understand where the album begins and ends, and its thematic limits,” he says.
The duality explored throughout the record has become increasingly apparent to Hawk through years of performing under his own name. The person on stage and the person away from it can feel like fundamentally different versions of the same individual, with the heightened, larger-than-life performer potentially overwhelming the quieter and more vulnerable self.
That tension also feeds directly into the songwriting. Hawk describes Intriguer / Tenderness as more excoriating in its self-reflection than A Firmer Hand, with the songs confronting some of the harshest internal criticism he has experienced.
The album explores the disturbing nature of an inner monologue capable of turning language against its owner. On Tuscan Kind, for example, Hawk examines the criticisms and insults he directs towards himself, while Mother Of Vinegar adopts a stark drum-machine pulse for a song written during an exceptionally difficult period. The latter’s reference to a south-facing psychiatric ward is deliberately misleading: the location was actually Hawk’s living room, where the song was written during a frantic session at what he describes as the deepest point of a particularly difficult period.
Elsewhere, recurring imagery of snakes and infants reinforces the album’s central conflict. The snake becomes a manifestation of Intriguer, while the infant represents Tenderness, creating an ongoing symbolic battle between corruption and vulnerability. That symbolism reflects Hawk’s longstanding fascination with language and imagery, but the new album also pushes his writing into more exposed territory. Rather than simply constructing elaborate lyrical worlds, he uses words to examine uncomfortable aspects of his own character.
Hawk has previously resisted descriptions of himself as a literary songwriter, arguing that such a label can obscure the immediacy of his work. His vocabulary and references instead emerge from a broad curiosity about the world around him, from books and overheard conversations to television, everyday encounters and the imagery that appears in his dreams. “I really shy away from lyrics that aren’t immediate,” he says. “I don’t mind a complexity of ideas, grappling with strange themes, getting down there, and getting gnarly.”
That word — gnarly — may be particularly appropriate for Intriguer / Tenderness. Hawk admits that some songs have confronted him so directly that he has felt nervous about even sharing them with his band, yet he has continued to follow those ideas wherever they lead.
The result is an album that appears to extend the intensity of A Firmer Hand, while changing the nature of the conflict. Where that record could embrace sexuality and confidence, Intriguer / Tenderness turns inward, examining what happens when confidence becomes performance, performance becomes identity and identity begins to fracture.
Even Hawk’s band noticed the unusual atmosphere during the recording process, with guitarist Andrew Pearson observing that “nobody seems to be getting on in this album”. The observation captures the album’s unusual construction: rather than presenting a single perspective, it stages a confrontation between different versions of the same person.
Despite its darkness, Hawk believes the album contains greater contrasts than its predecessor, with higher moments of lightness sitting alongside considerably deeper lows. Whether that ultimately makes Intriguer / Tenderness heavier than A Firmer Hand is something he remains uncertain about.
What is clear is that Hawk is leaving the question of what comes next deliberately open. “That’s the question – you’ve got all that out there, but surely the next thing you say has got to be a kinder thing, you know?” he says. “I don’t know when the light comes.”
Intriguer / Tenderness will be available on CD, cassette, standard black vinyl, a limited coloured D2C vinyl edition, a Rough Trade exclusive variant and a highly limited Dinked edition, with signed prints available with selected formats. To mark the album’s release, Hawk and his band will also embark on a series of instore and out-store performances across the UK, visiting London, Brighton, Kingston, Bristol, Nottingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
Upcoming UK & Ireland Live Dates:
APRIL
2nd – London, Rough Trade East
3rd – Brighton, Resident
4th – Kingston, Banquet @ Circuit
5th – Bristol, Rough Trade
6th – Nottingham, Rough Trade
7th – Liverpool, Jacaranda Baltic
8th – Leeds, Crash @ Wardrobe
22nd – Glasgow, Assai @ Saint Luke’s
23rd – Edinburgh, Assai @ La Belle Angele
24th – Aberdeen, Assai @ The Tunnels
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