‘Nothing, nothing done for the right reason…We’re just slaves to greed, ignorance, manipulation…Where once cogs turned, now unseen…Truth is hidden, obscured by a screen’ (In The Stone)

Normil Hawaiians are a post-punk collective hailing from South London, who were initially active between 1979 and 1986.  They released three LPs and a raft of EPs during their original incarnation, a period during which their sound evolved in increasingly experimental directions.  The 2015 release by Upset The Rhythm of the band’s ‘lost’ album, Return Of The Ranters, which was recorded in 1984/85, inspired the band to start playing music together again.  A series of live shows and new 7-inch in 2020 followed, before the band convened to record their first new album in nearly forty years.

Empires Into Sand stays true to the band’s latter-day roots of improvisation and experimentation, expertly fusing elements of ambient drone, driving motorik beats, and haunting folk.  The result is a shimmering, immersive soundscape defined by lush yet sparingly deployed instrumentation.  The songs take on an almost spectral quality as they weave together samples, interludes, and passages of spoken word to hypnotic effect, simultaneously both fragile and all-enveloping.

The album’s lyrical focus is primed by the opening tracks Exiles and Ghosts Of Ballochroy.  The former using samples to explore the plight of migrants, the latter darkly allusive poetry narrated by Scottish poet Rodney Relax to skewer the inequality riven through our society.  These are themes that are returned to on the meditative We Stand Together and the cosmic-tinged Big City Sky.  But, perhaps, the stand-out tracks are the beautiful, mournfully layered In The Stone and the more personal Back Home To The Stars, a thoroughly moving tribute to band member Mark Tyler who died during the recording of the album.