HANGMAN'S CHAIR: Saddiction (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

For almost twenty years, Hangman's Chair have been dragging their melancholy around like a second skin, sculpting a sound at the crossroads of doom, cold wave and grunge. From album to album, the band has refined its language, capturing the essence of urban solitude and transcribing it with raw sincerity. With “Saddiction”, they gain height without denying their burden, accentuating contrasts and densifying their universe. Where “A Loner” sank into monolithic darkness, its successor plays on the tension between oppressive heaviness and luminous escapes, between walls of guitars and ethereal melodies, between introspection and explosion.

From the very first seconds, the tone is set. The usual leaden blanket is there, thick, heavy, immersive, but something more organic slips in between the interstices. The guitars, as massive as ever, occasionally dare to take a melodic leap, a fragile breath before the wave crashes again. Hangman's Chair has not renounced the slow suffocation that characterizes its identity, but it seems to have gained in relief and breadth.

This evolution is reflected in the production, which is more chiselled and textured. Arrangements are superimposed with an almost cinematographic meticulousness, as on a track like 'Kowloon Lights', where icy layers caress riffs as heavy as the damp concrete of Alex Proyas' Dark City. There's something spectral about this music, a nocturnal wandering between deserted streets and trembling neon lights, a spleen that clings to the skin and refuses to dissipate. 2 AM Thoughts' perfectly illustrates this feeling of vertigo: the vocals of Raven van Dorst (Dool) intertwine with those of Cédric, adding another dimension to the ambient malaise, as if two lost souls were answering each other in an inner dialogue.

And then there's the restrained rage, the muted anger that finally erupts. The album becomes more dynamic, daring more brutal climbs in power, sometimes rediscovering a certain roughness that seemed to have been put aside on the previous album. 'The Worst Is Yet to Come' is a perfect example of this: an inexorable build-up, a wall of saturation that collapses in on itself, inhabited vocals that oscillate between resignation and defiance.

Hangman's Chair doesn't simply reproduce a formula. “Saddiction” marks an expansion, an affirmation of its identity in a more contrasting, almost cinematic form. Ever faithful to its DNA, the band never ceases to dig deeper, to flesh out its obsessions. Here, sadness is not an end, but a driving force, an exploration ground from which they draw the most beautiful darkness.
- Official website

HANGMAN'S CHAIR

SADDICTION

NUCLEAR BLAST

DOOM