Studying Absence (Tygr Rawwk Rcrds) is a collaboration between Hemlock Ernst — a side-project of Future Islands member  Samuel T. Herring — and longtime Beans (APC, Tygr Rawwk) collaborator Icky Reels. The label’s CEO carefully orchestrated the release. Herring initially caught the attention of Beans after his rhymes appeared on the 2022 R.A.P. Ferreira single “mythsysizer instinct.”

Herring had been a longtime fan of Beans and his group Anti-Pop Consortium. After connecting, Beans eventually coordinated a Herring vocal appearance on the Venga track “Anti-Star System.” Beans later encouraged Herring to make a record with Icky Reels, to push artistic boundaries. “With Hemlock Ernst, I tend to work over soul and jazz break-type beats. Icky Reels’ production was a far more industrial and acidic landscape. I knew this would be more cerebral, breaking down the beats, challenging the rhythms, and finding the voices. But I decided to accept the challenge,” Herring says. Beans was pleased with the end result, and Studying Absence is the most ambitious record in the Hemlock Ernst discography to date.

Following lead single “Raised In the South,” Hemlock Ernst and Icky Reels tap Armand Hammer’s Elucid on their newest track “Remains.” Other guests on the album include Fatboi Sharif, Egyptian Lover, and Beans himself. 

The synergy between Herring and Icky Reels is undeniable, and the entirety of Studying Absence thrums with seamless chemistry. Herring has spent the last 25 years using intimate dissections of his own life to question the overall human experience. While he has pondered hard as an artist, he has still to find the answers he seeks. “Studying Absence is what I see when I look in the mirror,” Herring says. The record explores the magic that can arise when people are brought together by fate and the poignant absence that underlines the human experience. The record evokes oblong antennae pressed against living dirt, glass rippled pink with amplified howling.

Of the album’s wide-ranging inspirations, Herring says: “Studying Absence is about my lost histories, my Southern South Pacific ancestry, my first relationships, physical abuse, drug addiction and the ghosts of the south — the roadkill on a long winter night. I was all these things but not one of them. The stories I don’t know, I can only imagine, but the same can be said for the stories that I know too well. The stories that I lived and made me who I am are now so far away that remembering them is like a dream. Did it happen? But I feel now like I felt then, like I’ve always felt looking into a mirror. This is potential and what was lost. This is technology and how it failed. This is imperialism and who it gained. A religion, an organized crime. All the people scattered.”

Herring claims that this is the most dense and complex Hemlock Ernst outing yet. He pushed the limits of his voice, capturing sounds he’d never before laid to tape. He aimed to contrast Icky Reels’ machine-like production, offsetting it with human emotion. From front to back, Studying Absence finds Herring uncovering stories and memories that had been buried for decades. After two decades of grinding,  Studying Absence is some of the most honest Hemlock Ernst output yet.