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Tobias Osland is the wildly inspiring guitarist and songwriter behind one of the most essential bands in hardcore right now, the Norwegian trio Hammok. He started in a place familiar to most players: banging out single-string renditions of Smoke On The Water and Seven Nation Army. The crucial difference is that he didn’t stay there.
His playing on the band’s latest effort, When Does This Place Become Our Scene, is an enthralling, kaleidoscopic blend of everything from the deeply industrial to colossal bending of metal’s finest dark-arts noise-smiths like Chelsea Wolfe, right through to math-rock rhythms and the manic melodicism of Refused. He knows both how to let it breathe and to leave you breathless.
Having harbored early and ultimately unfulfilled ambitions to be a drummer, Osland is a rhythm-first player – but don’t mistake that for being basic. Those instincts inform much of his playing, whether it’s his millipede fingering on Blast Off or the thundering arrangement of BANG.
“I do this picking thing a lot,” he says, “which is kind of a galloping rhythm and is very, very present in Blast Off. It’s very natural to me, but it’s not very natural to a lot of other guitarists. It’s like it’s in my hand. We have a guitar player with us now; he’s been struggling for ages getting it up to speed, and I was like, ‘Why is this so confusing?’”
He puts it down to his rhythmic obsession, along with hours spent drilling speed to Slipknot and the patterns of Dillinger Escape Plan and At The Drive-In; but it never feels dull.
“Everything is rhythm first; I feel like a lot of times it’s a drum beat and then I’m supplying the guitar on top,” he says. He’ll often flip the script by using the guitar as a percussive instrument – repeating a pattern, and then shifting the bass beneath it – for melodic interest.
“I fell in love with that on this album. Just not doing so many of the usual big chords and keeping the guitar to these small rhythmic patterns, like the song CND – that’s a kick pattern common in club music. I found it on TikTok. I was like, ‘Maybe that can be the guitar and you just make everything move around that.’”
Warped through a Whammy pedal and punctuated by wailing ghost-train leads and goliath bass drops, it’s hugely effective. It’s also one of those stupidly simple, massively inspiring ideas that works across just about any genre. I mention it feels like the rhythmic equivalent of lead guitarists channeling the phrasing of horn players.
“I’ve seen a lot of people talk about having rap flows in your head while you’re improvising guitar solos,” Osland responds. “Like following a Tupac or a Jay-Z flow in your head and playing to that. It’s fascinating.”
He’s equally varied and instinctive in his approach to tones. Most players can relate to the sinking feeling of having a great part lose its luster as they cycle presets in search of the ideal texture. The Hammok guitarist, again, does things differently.
“I think a sound can come first – you’re just playing to that sound or playing to whatever instrument you’re using. Like, is your guitar super-poorly intonated? What does that do to your playing? The guitar I played for seven years was impossible to intonate, so I couldn’t play open chords. That shaped how I play.
“Doing this album, I stumbled across so many sounds. Gooning for Free was just an accident of having my distortion pedals on and pitching the entire guitar an octave down with a Whammy pedal and reacting to that sound. I played one chord and it was like, ‘Whoa, that moves the entire room!’”
You can change your playing faster and more instinctively than you can switch a tone, meaning it’s a much more immediate way to write. “It’s all about responding,” Osland agrees. “There’s a lot of guitar moments on the album that I recorded with my phone in my bedroom, like the intro for CND and Confidence Of A Beaten Horse.
“Then I just popped it into the session and it sounded cool. I’m very happy with that. It feels like you’re collecting the memories along the way of creating the song – and it’s all there in the final product.”
It may not shock you to learn that the maverick guitarist-songwriter-producer behind one of the year’s most exciting and sonically unhinged punk releases is not super-fussy about his gear. His main guitar is an utterly trashed, but characterful 2009 Gibson Melody Maker.
He reports he’s broken the headstock twice: once on tour in the UK as guitarist with Sløtface; and once in a performance for a group of elementary school kids that I truly wish I’d seen. “It was this school program thing; we played two or three shows every day for from Monday to Friday.
“The last second of the last show of the week, I was out in the crowd and banging on the neck, and the headstock just popped off. It brought back all the trauma of the UK tour. I was like, ‘I’m standing in the middle of these young school children destroying my guitar – for this?!’”
I use lots of plugins. Whatever Skrillex is using is probably going to make your guitar explode, which is fun!
His other option is a Frankenstein-ed Strat that kind of did come back from the dead: “The one that I use, my dad found on the street. I put a new neck on, and somehow it works. The pickups are super-high output because they’re super-cheap, so it’s super-aggressive.”
A new, considerably lower-performance spin on the Superstrat, then. On the amp front it’s a Laney V100R and a Vox V30 for most of the album (Quad Cortex live), though he admits to having a secret weapon in the box.
“I use lots of plugins – a lot of the stuff is meant for dubstep and those distortions are just insane. They’re not vintage, they’re not trying to be some cool outboard gear; they’re just kind of fucked. Whatever Skrillex is using is probably going to make your guitar explode, which is fun!”
