“Me and Cav have always said that our day will come,” Austin Williams told NME earlier this year, sitting in a Brussels bowling alley between recording sessions. “We just don’t know when.” Fifteen years into Swim Deep’s career, that sentence lands differently than it once did. Less like optimism, more like a covenant. Hum, their fifth album, sounds like a band honouring that covenant whether or not anyone’s listening.
Williams became a father during the making of this record. In the same month his daughter Mary was born, his partner’s father died. He called it “mind-splitting”. The album holds both without dramatising either, which is harder than it sounds and explains why Hum feels different to anything Swim Deep have made before. Not louder or more ambitious. Just more settled in what it’s for.
Producer Bill Ryder-Jones keeps the arrangements open and unhurried. The guitars on opener ‘Pieces Of You’ shimmer and spread without crowding Williams’ breathy vocal, which sits at the centre of every track without having to fight for it. ‘Mud’ is where the album commits most fully. A baggy beat under a grungy guitar figure, a chorus that builds, pulls back and builds again. Every review singles it out and they’re right to. It’s three and a half minutes of a band that has worked out exactly what it’s doing.
‘You, Me & Mary’ is where the emotional weight of the record lands most directly. Williams writes about his daughter plainly and without sentimentality, and the production gives the lyric room to sit. You feel the grief underneath it without being told it’s there.
My one reservation is that Hum occasionally pulls back just as it’s about to fully commit. ‘The Throw’ sets up a guitar outro that sounds ready to be something and then isn’t quite. ‘Is There Something Going On’ contains the lines “pack it up like an Eddie Stobart lorry” and “have you tried to turn it on and off again”, which land with a thud in an album otherwise admirably free of clunky writing. A few tracks reach only two-thirds of what they seem to be reaching for.
But fifteen years in, still going, still meaning it. Hum is the best thing Swim Deep have made. Their day will come. It might already have.
