Hamish Hawk puts A Firmer Hand on his new album and a gig at Staggeringly Good Brewery with Pie & Vinyl

His third album, A Firmer Hand, is out today (August 16), and the singer-songwriter describes it as “the most exposing record I’ve ever written.”

Hawk takes his acknowledged influences like Jarvis Cocker, Scott Walker and Leonard Cohen and has created something truly his own. It’s a thumping, ribald album packed with arch indie-pop and rock. While never a coy songwriter, this album delves further into themes of sex, male sexuality, violence and all of that rich, dark territory then he ever has before.

Speaking to The News on the eve of its release, Hawk says: “It has felt a long time coming but we've been treating this album as like the third installment in a trilogy. Not only thematically, but it's felt like a little epoch, a little era in our life, so we're really excited to have it out.”

“For me, it's the most exposing record I've ever written, certainly the most challenging lyrically, so on a professional level I'm excited for it to come out, but on a personal level it's always nice when an album comes out to be able to say: ‘Okay, it's done. I can't touch it, I can't change it, it belongs to someone else and they're in charge of it now’.

“I'm looking forward to Friday just because it will be that big exhale and then you can turn your attention to whatever comes next.”

When asked if this album is more autobiographical than its predecessors, he says: “It's difficult to say, because I would say I: 'absolutely, my writing is purely autobiographical'

“All of the lyrics and all of the songs, if you were to take any individual couplet or any particular phrase or any particular image, I would be able to tell you exactly where I was in my life, what I'm referring to, how I was feeling, who it refers to and all of that.

“I don't tend to deal too much in the abstract. I would say that I'm a diaristic writer at heart. A lot of it is therapeutic for me, a lot of it is processing things, doing all this writing is actually something that helps me personally, and so they're real experiences

“That said, not all the time have my songs been plain-speaking. They've dealt with sort of vagaries and also in a kind of high drama, so I'll take a real situation and I'll knock it against something else.

“I'll take something from my life and laterally in my head it will connect with something else. It might be some kind of cultural reference or whatever and I'll knock it against that and see how they interact, how the diary entry interacts with this, whatever it might be this other image. And then the songs tend to explode outwards from there.

"So they are autobiographical, but they're also larger than life. They deal in this kind of high drama, and I would say even melodrama in places.

“This album is just as steeped in imagery as the others have been, but I've been relying more on being direct and being plain-speaking and not trying to hide too much behind overly clever turns a phrase. It's more honest.

“The distance between when I when I start writing a song and when I eventually record it, I tried to keep the language as unmuddy or unprocessed, between those times.

“They are as unvarnished lyrics as I've ever as I've ever written, but at the same time I think they're stronger for that.”

Rest assured, though, this is coming from a performer whose biggest singalong live number is a previous single with the markedly un-snappy title, The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973. The album is still packed with the sharp couplets and witty one-liners we’ve come to expect.

"This album has been a real school day for me. I've learned a lot from it and I think it's going to affect my writing going into the future with any luck as well.”

While Hawk says he’s tried to be more “plain-speaking”, he’s also opened himself up a lot more about male sexuality.

"With (his previous two albums) Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers, the songs have always been romantic, they're steeped in this kind of romantic world view, and so it's been all the classic beats of all that – the unrequited love, the jealousy of love, the thrill of the chase and the tipsy indiscretions or whatever.

“I also want to make clear, it wasn't that I've ever hidden anything before this one, but that's what they (his previous songs) were, and they were detailing my life at the time. But then I wrote a couple of songs for this record, or what would become this record. The first one I wrote was a song called Questionable Hit. I noticed that I had a bit of a slightly more petty voice or slightly more slightly cruel edge, or just a bit embittered and really honest and kind of bare-faced side.

“I thought: ‘Okay, right, I don't know where that song is going to go, I'll put that to one side and I'll think about that another time’.

“And then I wrote Machiavelli's Room. Then I was like, ‘Okay, right, well a song like this is really not going to be happy sitting next to songs like those on Angel Numbers or Heavy Elevator.

“It made so many more demands of me as a songwriter and demanded that the whole album be cut from that cloth, really.

“It wasn't so much that I sat down and thought 'this is what I'm going to write about', it was more that that song revealed itself to me, and then I thought okay, well in order for that song to actually be given a seat at the table, I'm going to need to make a certain kind of table for it!

“In the end the album became this sort of exposé.

“It’s arguably an analysis of a particular theme – it really ran with that theme across the entire record as opposed to dipping its toes in different kinds of things, which I feel that the previous records do. The thing that unifies the songs is the voice, you could say, actually, that there is this common theme or themes running through the record and that governed itself.

“It wasn't necessarily a conscious approach, it just happened that way, and as the songs got written, it started to just roll in.

"In the past I've dealt with this romanticism, but these (new) songs revealed to me that actually, what they were going to prefer to talk about was sex, eroticism, lust, desire, aggression and violence, and all the things that are conspicuously absent from the previous stuff.”

With the more open, direct approach he’s taken on this album does Hawk feel any trepidation as the album is finally going to be heard by others?

"The more I talk about the record, the more I realise I'm still learning about how to talk about these things, how to talk about the record, what it sounds like to other people.

"When you record or when you write or when you're mixing a record, you know least of all what it sounds like.

“I can only hear myself when I listen to these songs, and the band hear their own parts and whatever and you really don't know what it sounds like. You certainly don't make any comparisons. You can't say: ‘Oh, this reminds me of so-and-so’. You really don't have a good perspective on it – it's too subjective a perspective on it.

" As we get to release day, I am nervous about it, but the more I talk about it, the more I think about it, the more I feel assured that it's exactly the thing I need to be doing.”

Hawk performs at Staggeringly Good Brewery in Milton as an out-store for Pie and Vinyl. Tickets and album bundles from £12-30.99. Go to pandvrecords.co.uk.