HMS Morris's fourth album, SACI HACS, is out on 30 October via Bubblewrap Collective – the Cardiff label that's also home to Georgia Ruth, The Gentle Good and Carwyn Ellis. It's almost exactly three years since their last one, Dollar Lizard Money Zombie, and this one was recorded partly at the band's own home in Cardiff and partly in an underground garage in Johnstown.
The press release calls it "an enigmatic sack of peculiar hacks" – personal tricks for filtering out the bullshit, avoiding self doubt and turning feminine rage into something useful. They're quick to add it's not meant as a productivity guide though – more a pile of messy fixes that work for them, not a system for anyone else to copy.
Bubblewrap Collective also put out records by Georgia Ruth, The Gentle Good and Carwyn Ellis, and a fourth HMS Morris album from the same Cardiff label is one I'm happy to put my name behind. The band's own insistence that their "hacks" aren't a productivity system, just personal fixes that work for them, is the kind of honesty I wanted to recommend alongside it.
Musically it's billed as a free-for-all – no fixed genre, just a mix of real instruments and electronica that press reviews have called "strange and beautiful" (Electronic Sound) and "a multi-dimensional sound that traipses across hitherto unexplored regions" (Clash). Llion Robertson produced and mixed the album, and Charlie Francis did the mastering.
HMS Morris play Bangor's BANG Festival at Pontio on 23 October, then head out on a full SACI HACS launch tour in November – finishing, fittingly, with the official launch show back home at Cardiff's Clwb Ifor Bach.
- 23 Oct – Bangor, Pontio (BANG Festival)
- 7 Nov – Bristol, The Lanes (Simple Things Festival)
- 13 Nov – Glasgow (Pop Mutations X Tiny Changes Festival)
- 14 Nov – Edinburgh, Leith FAB Cricket Club
- 19 Nov – Oxford, The Nest
- 20 Nov – Cardiff, Clwb Ifor Bach (official SACI HACS launch)
You can hear SACI HACS on Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/RGgiJghJ3HYDAUuV3a
HMS Morris are on Instagram and X as @HMSMorris.