Since early 2020, Munich-based instrumental visionary Hmunga, the brainchild of Florian Zelinski, has maintained a relentless creative output. With multiple EPs and full-lengths under their belt, Hmunga has now unveiled Mammoth—a transcendent fusion of scorching, psychedelic incantations and celestial space-rock odysseys that have fueled our imagination ever since Chrysocolla emerged in March 2020. Over time, their sonic palette has expanded into something vast and all-consuming, culminating in this six-track cosmos of swirling nebulae and cosmic harmonies.
Mammoth distills the synth-drenched ambient grandeur of Tangerine Dream, the exploratory spirit of Hawkwind, and the hypnotic weight of Om, forging a singular alchemy that defies conventional genre boundaries. With this latest opus, Hmunga opens new dimensional doorways, crafting a soundscape untethered from earthly constraints—an aural supernova erupting from the void into infinity.
The album embarks on a steady ascent, its journey beginning with the slow-burning “Last Pilgrimage,” a deceptively tranquil initiation that swells into a breathtaking peak—though even at its most intense, it feels like a mere prelude to the intergalactic voyage that follows in “Neptune Frost.” However, it’s the album’s middle arc—“Pyramid of Giants,” “The Tusk Throne,” and “Herd of Stone”—that forms the record’s pulsating core. This trilogy of searing kosmische soundscapes illuminates the void with electrifying radiance.
While the first two of this trio explode into euphoric climaxes rarely matched in modern space rock, “Herd of Stone”shifts into a serene, weightless drift, floating through the ether even as everything else fades into oblivion. The colossal closer “Icebound Monarch” mirrors the album’s grand entrance, methodically expanding across nine spellbinding minutes before erupting into a cosmic pyrotechnic finale. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album that thrives in a realm beyond time and space—one that doesn’t simply close with a bang, but exists as the bang itself. The result? A record so immersive that it demands to be replayed until the listener becomes one with its dreamlike hallucination.
There’s something undeniably monumental about Mammoth. It defies its own physical limitations, obliterates sonic frontiers, and ventures into the distant reaches of the red shift. This interstellar odyssey marks the most expansive, immersive, and boundary-pushing release of Hmunga’s career, realizing every ambition of its predecessors tenfold. A monolithic, celestial voyage, Mammoth lingers long after its final echoes dissolve—its echoes reverberating until the world itself collapses into dust.
Grab Mammoth from Bandcamp.
There’s something undeniably monumental about Mammoth. It defies its own physical limitations, obliterates sonic frontiers, and ventures into the distant reaches of the red shift.
