Dean: HAVVK make anxiety sound beautiful

Artists who attempt to generate a feeling of anxiety in their music are a brave cohort. Pursuing the sugar rush is, of course, an equally noble deed; an ability to hit the mind’s pleasure centres is a blessed skill. But making more desperate sensations palatable for audiences poses different challenges. How do you engage a part of the brain that people fear, in a way that engrosses and rather than repulses?

This was the question that must have swirled around HAVVK as they recorded Time Will Kill, an album that, its creators say, was motivated by a sense that time is slipping through their fingers. This unease was furthered with a creeping feeling of guilt – the world was in a downward death spiral, and HAVVK were spending their days working on tunes.

Plenty of bands engage with socio-political themes, some acknowledge the privilege that allows them to make art about such issues, but few sound as burdened by that privilege as HAVVK do on Time Will Kill. Many of the 11 tracks are sprightly, doubling down on the band’s sense that there is no time to waste. Harnessing the raw power of 1990s metal and grunge, while adding in the righteous belligerence of punk, the album weeps at a high volume.

It’s natural that a band with an activist spirit like HAVVK would come to feel unease about an increasingly cursed world. Having been established in 2012 by Julie Hough and Matt Harris under the name Hawk (this remains the pronunciation of the band’s name; Hough has at times also gone by the name Julie Hawk), they established themselves with songs that tackled serious issues in a serious way. Early single “Once Told” addressed Ireland’s pre-referendum abortion laws, with a striking video featuring a dead-eyed Hough standing vulnerable in a hospital gown: “What’s new? Smothering it in shame?”

The emotive but tuneful “Mirror Maze” probed society’s expectations on women, while the murky “Take it Away” was inspired by a friend of Hough’s frightening experience of being followed home by a man after a night out. HAVVK’s journey has come to include stints in not just Dublin, but London and Berlin; additional members Chris Handsley and Sam Campbell made crucial contributions, Nigel Kenny filled in on the drums. But for Time Will Kill, the band’s fourth album, HAVVK’s official line-up represents their leanest form: a duo.

It begins with one of the year’s great opening tracks. “Happening Again” is a vicious, slow-paced jam; an industrial zone of Harris’s howling guitars, Hough’s rugged bass, and punishingly thumped drums as the singer wails with primal urgency.

The song opens a three-track salvo that showcases Hough’s vocal dexterity. Hers is a voice that never stays still, switching from bellowing, to tuneful, to half-spoken word performance and beyond, sometimes within the same song. This is important. On an album where anxiety is the octane, the moment Hough begins to falter could be the moment the tension becomes overwhelming. Fortunately, she carries the album with equal parts poise and power, never losing contact with the listener.

Oh, and by the way, HAVVK can do sugar rush pop too: Highlight “Bad Look” connects the dots from 1960s girl groups to 1990s stoner bubblegum indie. Call it nostalgia for throwback American teen movies.

Time Will Kill does, for the most part, strike a serious tone. “Idea 21” has the nervous energy of Radiohead while sharing Thom Yorke’s attention to environmental destruction (“Where did you run when the sky turned red?”). And on the excellent closer, “This Is It”, a breathy Hough instructs her audience to “smile” in a manner so sinister and derisory, it calls to mind horror movies where the scariest thing is the grinning villain.

Lyrics are typically abstract. Press notes for the album explain that “Pick Your Poison” is about the expectation placed on social media users to choose a side of a debate without being fully informed. The lyrics “The road was mine to take/ But it’s better sitting on the fence/ I make the same mistake/ And expect a different consequence,” certainly sums up the feeling of emptiness that rises up when you’ve sunk time and energy into a comment thread discussion that went nowhere, but it does emphasise that HAVVK’s lyrics often do require provided context to be fully appreciated.

More than anything, though, Time Will Kill is a triumph of the collaborative process. Hough and Harris remain creatively connected, even in their anxiety, which they, together, funnelled into an impressive, impactful piece of work. Because despite the tension, the album is enjoyable, as all music must be before it can be anything else. The world is becoming a flaming shroud, figurately and environmentally. Still, HAVVK should keep making music.