Album Review: HIMALAYAS - 'From Hell To Here'
Opening with the penetrative blare of a klaxon, debut album ‘From Hell To Here’ by Cardiff quartet HIMALAYAS starts off as urgent, in-your-face rock — and, even as tempo wavers, that intensity never fades.
You know the story. Four friends, united by a shared love of music, decided to start a band. They cut their teeth on a load of hometown shows, slowly venturing further and further out from home, until suddenly they’re everywhere — SXSW, Reading and Leeds, Radio One. Simple, right?
Well, it’s never quite that easy, particularly in the case of Cardiff rockers HIMALAYAS. Sure, the start might be similar — Joe Williams, Mike Griffiths and James Goulbourn, knowing each other from school, started a band, with Goulbourn roping in bassist Louis Heaps from work. A mixture of covers and originals sparked interest, and, with influences growing darker and heavier, they began to make their own sound. Slow, bluesy ‘Ecstasy’, piercing, angst-filled ‘Intoxicate Me’, acerbic ‘Cheap Thrills’. A string of incredible singles followed, notably 2017’s ‘Thank God I’m Not You’, currently sitting at a cool thirty seven million streams on Spotify, or there about. They had their band, they had their style, and the world was theirs for the taking.
But, suddenly, 2020 happened — and not in the way you’re expecting. At the tail end of 2019, Williams collapsed into a coma after a show; he made a full recovery, thankfully, but that combined with 2020 put a bit of a... 'damper' on everything.
Yet, it’s this damper that has led the band to this, their debut album. Harnessing a beautiful blend of carpe diem and joie de vivre, the album’s… vibrant. It’s practically alive in and of itself, a seething, writhing, thing that, even while drowning you in its ferocity, only promises more to come. There’s the opener, title track ‘From Hell To Here’, sitting pretty somewhere between The Amazons and Queens Of The Stone Age, full of grunge-y vitriol, blues-laden riffs and a deceptively simple chorus; there’s the silky smooth ‘Into The Trap’, the fear and foreboding brought about by the unknown held at bay purely by the band’s self-assured swagger, or the sinister cynicism of ‘Somebody Else’, flitting between anger and anguish over the helplessness of an abusive relationship. Bouncy ‘Into The Trap’ feels almost serpentine in its meandering beat and the sibilance of its cymbals, relying more on the incessant pulse of its drums slithering into your ears than the shock and awe found elsewhere in the album, while
the hope-filled yet oppressive ‘Out Of The Dark And Into The Light’, filled with menacing infrasound-esque low tones, and the Sisyphean ‘Leave This Place’ — trying, needing to escape but ending up right back at the start — leave you feeling trapped, piercing guitars bleeding anxiety even while the menacing vocals hold you firm.
The accolade of most interesting track on the album, though, goes to closer ‘After Time’. Feeling more like Radiohead than Royal Blood, a haunting falsetto and an understated piano melody ease you into a lulled peace, before a sonic wall — a perfectly honed cacophony of guitars, bass, drums, and Williams’ cries of ‘you’re just waiting for the end!’ — shatter that fake illusion of safety.
With guitar cries mirroring the opening klaxons of the album the only adornment to Williams’ surprisingly gentle crooning, the final lines of said closer, or indeed the full album, ask one final question: ‘when is a secret not a secret anymore?’ But what’s the secret? Life? Afterlife? Happiness? Existence?
Or, simply, are HIMALAYAS the secret? That one, at least, has an answer as glaringly obvious as the blare of the klaxons— after the release of an astoundingly good debut album, of course! Give the album a little while to wind up and HIMALAYAS won’t be a secret for much longer.
Words by James O’Sullivan
