After dazzling the avant-garde music scene in the Iberian Peninsula —and beyond— in 2023 with «Landfillandfillandfill», Hulm now return with their fourth studio album, entitled «La maniobra de Heimlich». With this title, the Barcelona band formed by Joan Torné, Ernest Pipó and Eduardo Pons refers to the first aid technique used to clear the airway of a person at risk of choking, caused by a piece of food or any other object blocking it. Recorded by Ernest Pipó himself at La caseta de la Marina (as was the previous album) and mixed by Aleix Andorrà, all the music on this new album is the result of improvisation: musical ideas that arise from any of the three musicians, who always participate equally in each track.
With a more punk-oriented approach, sound and aesthetic, this new album reaffirms and represents a major step forward from the atonal developments and unresolved harmonic transitions that we fell in love with in «Landfillandfillandfill». Thus, in «La maniobra de Heimlich», we find ourselves faced with a textural conciseness and structural conceptualism with which the Barcelona trio deploys and retracts its full denotative potential with agility—in a matter of bars—towards extremely concrete, beautifully dissonant motifs with enigmatic melodies that conclude in an elegant and eminently experimental (intuited, not prepared) quasi-repose that transports us. The musical maturity of Pipó, Pons and Torné is such that the expressive power of their pieces makes us wonder whether we are listening to an improvisational band or whether, in fact, everything has been composed in advance. Exceptional. Chapeau.
The album begins with the tense industrial calm that precedes chaos, with «Opening for the belated apocalypse», before delving into the first track in Hulm’s history where (surprise!) we encounter a voice singing a melody in Catalan, as simple as it is captivating (1,2,3 AGRAÏT). We cross the erratic passage of «free salvaje (con drumz)» and arrive at «Houston…», a piece that perfectly evokes the feeling of helplessness. Side A ends with the faint tremor of a mist, behind which there seems to be «Un llimoner», as its green and yellow colours can be glimpsed, flickering while diffuse arpeggios resonate over the base of what we commonly call noise. Side B opens with a minimalist gem, «Carrousel speed», before plunging us into the cacophonous euphoria of «no hay clase», which ends in the best possible way: with the explicitly pop childhood memories that are sweetly evoked by both «BANANA FROZEN DAIQUIRI» and «Signature Croquette», bidding us farewell with a smile.
