Three and a half minutes into High and Just Proceedings, the debut album from Finnish band Hypnoma, the mood decisively changes. The time signature shifts, the soundscape calms, and a guitar rises above everything around it. Serene. Weightless. Unfettered. I reached for the air guitar before I knew I’d moved. Irresistible. Oh, yes, let it out. Let it all out. Let the gurning begin.
It felt so good. But, unfortunately for me, it happened at a point where I had not yet read the words.
Hold onto ‘unfettered’. It returns at the end of the album in another form, and by then it has taught me something about myself I’m not sure I wanted to learn.
Hypnoma build their sound around three guitars. Aku Murtokangas, Toni Pajari and Jere Pettersson weave and interlock, with Pajari also handling vocals and keyboards, while session players Ilmari Hämäläinen on drums and Valtteri Rouhiainen on bass drive everything forward beneath them. Four long pieces, none under seven minutes, the whole journey is complete in a little under thirty-five.
The opener, For Those It May Concern, arrives like a tsunami: no preamble, no build-up or time to get ready, just a low and faintly echoed vocal set against a gritty, frenetic weave of strings. Time signatures shift constantly, and every shift serves to create momentum and mood. Fuzz sits in the mix from the first bar and slowly rises into sharper focus. The playing breathes like improvisation but lands like precise composition. These are musicians painting with strings.
Then there’s the lyrics. The album takes its title from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. In particular, it references the moment when Marlow, newly arrived at the Company station, passes a chain gang and bitterly counts himself among those engaged in “the great cause of these high and just proceedings”. It is a phrase steeped in irony: imperial brutality dressed in the language of moral purpose. Hypnoma makes it the album’s core and governing idea.
Marlow opens the recording, signing on and having his head measured by the Company doctor, telling himself “all the things I want to hear”. He closes it too, lying to Kurtz’s Intended. Between those two moments sail Francis Drake and a voice from no particular century, promising greatness to anyone willing to chant along. Yes, America. 2026. I’m looking at you. The final track, Kurtz, completes the abysmal descent: the ideal once seemingly justifying the journey is revealed as just another seductive, destructive fiction.
Hypnoma have hidden a quite remarkable intelligence inside all these guitars. The music is the tide sweeping you upriver. The words, however, wait, patiently, for anyone prepared to finally read the small print.
Lambs hands the microphone to the hollow man himself, and he addresses his flock. Grievance comes first: “Where’s your reward? / Who’s taken your bone?” Flattery follows, dressed as sympathy (“victims of your own virtue”), and with it the promise: “I’ll give you sense of greatness.” Then possession. “You’re my own.” Chuggy guitars swagger across the soundscape, the breaks between time changes shorten, and the pace builds into something giddy, playful, and wholesomely foot-stomping. A ride you can’t get off. Over all this exhilaration, the voice confesses in plain sight: “I lie for you / I lie to you.” The sheer beauty of it is captured perfectly: nobody cares.
The flock answers “Aye, aye, aye.” I heard “I, I, I.” It doesn’t really matter. The lambs give their assent; the hollow man hears only his own voice.
And then the song crashes to a halt. A lone guitar sweeps into a vast, cavernous space, calling, calling, calling. No response. Conrad describes Kurtz as hollow to the core, and here Hypnoma give us the full taste of what hollowness feels like. The guitar circles, repeats, adds, finds a path of its own. A lamb, lost, with no voice left to follow.
Out In the Distance brings a slower pace and changes the mood. A light guitar, a simple beat, the unnerving sense of something brooding at the edges. This is Drake’s story, privateering under royal commission, and to Thomas Doughty, the gentleman Drake put on trial and beheaded on the Patagonian shore in 1578, on the same ground where Magellan once crushed a mutiny. The voice narrates in a calm, reportive manner, seemingly detached and dissociated: “A dinner with the master / Pleasant conversation / Toast for the Queen / Communion on the deck.” The courtesy chills. The refrain thickens. The music waits, anticipating what happens when manners run out, and the show’s superficiality ends.
A fuzzed solo, eager yet wary, stops dead in a haze of distortion. “Execution party rows to the shore.” The guitar returns on the hunt, closer, closer, its spaced notes merging into one continuous thrum, the drums heavier, louder. A drumroll in all but name.
Then mist. An echoed keyboard. Nothing. Hypnoma never let us see the blade fall.
Which leaves us at the end of the river. Kurtz opens in another world, light arpeggios surveying the scene, until the guitar hardens into a single clear electric voice, rising, sweeping, present over everything. Conrad gives Kurtz a supreme eloquence. Hypnoma let the guitar speak for him before a word is sung. When the vocal does arrive, it carries a country inflection, plain and plaintive. Marlow remembers the “fleeting kinship”, the “savage dance”, the “ivory white lie” he slipped to the Intended, the audience hanging on every precious word because “all we ask for is / sense of greatness”. And the refrain, again and again: “Tell me truth any truth / Tell me lie any lie / And I’ll follow you with no restraints.” The voice wants to belong. Desperate for a home, any home.
A fall from grace has never sounded so alluringly seductive.
The solo arrives aggressive, dominant, centre stage: madness dancing with madness, inexorable, no escape. It tails off into arpeggios. Mist again, waves of distortion, suggestive and unresolved. We never learn what happened. We only know we willingly followed.
Unfettered. No restraints. The same release, heard from opposite ends of the river.
At three and a half minutes, I let it all out. And I’ll tell you something here and now. I’ll gurn along again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. But what Hypnoma have shown me is the delicious seduction of the thrill, so irresistible: a hunger for greatness, and the ease with which people follow whoever’s voice promises it. The seduction is all but complete before it lets you see it for what it is. The seeing leaves the joy intact. But you are left with a joy which is much harder to trust.
Four tracks. Thirty-five minutes. One long journey upriver, and no way back to the man who first reached for the air guitar.
For those it may concern.
TRACK LISTING
01. For Those It May Concern (7:06)
02. Lambs (7:37)
03. Out In The Distance (9:53)
04. Kurtz (9:52)
Total Time – 35:28
MUSICIANS
Aku Murtokangas – Guitar
Toni Pajari – Vocals, Keyboards, Guitar
Jere Pettersson – Guitar
~ With:
Ilmari Hämäläinen – Drums
Valtteri Rouhiainen – Bass
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Eclipse Music
Country of Origin: Finland
Date of Release: 9th October 2026
LINKS
Hypnoma – Facebook | Bandcamp (Eclipse Music) | YouTube | Instagram
This review first appeared at The Progressive Aspect on 25 October 2026.