Any Hum fans here?

I dug these guys back in high school ever since I heard “Stars” on the radio one night, and while they had kind of fallen out of rotation for a while there You’d Prefer an Astronaut and Downward is Heavenward were in heavy rotation for me in my adolescence and 20s.

So, in the single most improbable bit of good news to come out of 2020, Hum broke a nearly 23-year hiatus by unexpectedly releasing a new album at the end of June. And in the second most improbable bit of good news to come out of this year, it’s actually really, legitimately good. Kind of dumbfoundingly so.

This definitely won’t be everone’s cup of tea, but if sort of ethereal-yet-heavy unabashedly geeky riff-based hard rock sounds like your sort of thing, this album rules.

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Hum is one of the most important bands in my development as an artist. Truly. I grew up in smaller Illinois city exactly like the band grew up in. When I was first taking music seriously and touring I started to realize how different music cultures are from area to area and wanted to reflect what I felt was the culture of where I lived. Hum and the Cap ‘n’ Jazz guys were my absolute idols. Even though that stuff was technically before my time, it felt like the most vital and true to my experience

That link is the record a like minded drummer and I made about ten years ago as our love letter to Hum+The Promise Ring+ all the super talented but super dysfunctional bands from our hometown

The new Hum record rules. The snare is bizarrely brutal. I have grown to appreciate that choice though. I really love the feel they’ve adopted for this record. The drums are much more ominous and behind and allowed to breathe. The way that the chords are being voiced so that the amps are sagging in and out supports the feeling of breath too. I love it

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Yes, just saw this the other day. Great band with a uniquely “heavy” songwriting approach given the usual tendencies in the genre. Found them through Ben Sharp from Cloudkicker years ago; they were a pretty big influence on his writing for Fade.

edit: Production values on this are absolutely insane. Sounds huge

Hum had one of the silliest Beavis and Butthead segments which is really saying something!

It’s also weirdly reminiscent of Devin Townsend’s production choices, which certainly could be his nfluence but just as plausibly could be trying to solve the same production challenge - having these huge, dense, flowing layers of sound, and trying to tetris everything together into something that fits together nicely. He favors a lot more click to the kick drum than they do, but the snares have similar bright, spikey high end.