Formed in 2003, Hammock is the duo of guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. Since then, the band has emerged as a leading light in instrumental music with a unique sound that has masterfully melded elements of ambient, electronic, post-rock, and neoclassical, resulting in a body of work that’s as varied as it is incomparable.

In March 2005, Hammock released their debut LP, Kenotic, which was positively reviewed by The Wire and NPR, received national airplay from Echoes and Hearts of Space, and several songs from the record were licensed for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. The band’s 2006 follow-up Raising Your Voice... Trying to Stop an Echo served as their breakout release, led by the strength of its mesmerizing opener, “I Can Almost See You”, a song which has received tens of millions of streams and is a staple of Apple’s playlist “Post Rock Essentials”. The album was favorably reviewed by Pitchfork and Pop Matters, and caught the attention of Jón Þór Birgisson and Alex Somers (Sigur Ros and Jonsi and Alex), leading to an invitation to perform at the U.S. debut of their Riceboy Sleeps art exhibition in 2007, Hammock’s first-ever live performance. The music written for this event became Hammock’s third LP, Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, a beautiful, haunting album entirely absent of beats and vocals. It was recommended as an “immersive listen” by Pitchfork and praised by Boomkat and LA Times. The album’s video for “Mono No Aware” by David Altobelli was nominated at the international festival Plus Camerimage as “Best Music Video” alongside artists such as Coldplay and Depeche Mode, and it was also recognized in a second category, “Best Cinematography”.

In 2008, the band supported Stars of the Lid on a string of live dates, culminating in a joint performance at the eminent Wordless Music event in New York City. Hammock returned in May of 2010 with their fourth LP, Chasing After Shadows... Living with the Ghosts, garnering positive reviews from BBC, Pitchfork, Oxford American, and NPR. Coldplay featured the video for “Breathturn” on their popular Hypnofeed and it made a high-profile appearance at the L.A. Film Festival. Additionally, the track “Andalusia” was featured in an episode of the Showtime series Californication, commencing a long string of film and TV licenses for the band.

Following the destruction of Byrd’s home during the devastating Nashville floods of 2010, the band released The Longest Year EP in December as a means of coping. Consequence of Sound wrote, “Stark but romantic, desolate but enduring.” In 2011, Hammock released Asleep in the Downlights, an EP in collaboration with Steve Kilbey and Tim Powles of The Church, which was favorably reviewed by Paste Magazine among others.

Released in 2012, Departure Songs proved to be Hammock’s most ambitious LP to date, containing nineteen tracks and nearly two full hours of music. Cherished by the band’s passionate listener base for its bold and unflinching meditation on life and death, the album also received positive critical response from Echoes host John Diliberto, who named it album of the year on his annual list. The “Echoes” syndicated radio show has named Hammock as the #1 Album in years 2010, 2012, and 2017 along with inclusions somewhere in the top 30 every other year eligible.

Taking a major step into neoclassical territory, the band released their sixth LP Oblivion Hymns in 2013, which was positively received by MAGNET, among others. Upon reaching the ears of Ricky Gervais, he proclaimed Hammock his “new favorite band” to his legion of Twitter followers in 2015, adding they are “mesmerizing and inspirational,” and “like Radiohead does the best film score ever.” The cover artwork, created by Amy Pleasant, and the video for “Dark Beyond the Blue”, created by Andrew Thompson, were featured in “Pattern Recognition”, an exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.

Described by the band as a return to their guitar-based roots, Hammock released their seventh LP Everything and Nothing in 2016. The album presented the duo with an opportunity to work with Peter Katis (The National, Jónsi, Interpol), who mixed the album. One of the early singles, “Dissonance”, is one of the core songs in Spotify’s playlist “Shoegaze Classics”.

In 2017, Hammock released their eighth LP, Mysterium, the first in a planned trilogy of works. This somber and beautiful album was composed as a memorial to Clark Kern, a son-like figure to Hammock co-founder Marc Byrd who died in 2016 from the tumor strain NF2. The album’s title track was chosen by Nike for the company’s memorial video for Kobe Bryant and was also licensed for the feature film “Detroit”. Later in 2017, the band provided the original music for Kogonada’s acclaimed and award-winning film Columbus, starring John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, and Parker Posey. Hammock’s score received positive mentions from NPR, LA Times, and The New York Times and was released as an original soundtrack album.

The band also created tracks for We Will Rise Again, the critically-acclaimed official soundtrack to UbiSoft’s hit video game Far Cry 5 in 2018. Later that year, Hammock released Universalis, the penultimate album in their planned trilogy, and Silencia followed in 2019, garnering praise from Hot Press, CLASH, and NPR, closing the series.

Early in 2019, Ricky Gervais personally hand-picked nine Hammock tracks for his Netflix series After Life, which are also featured on the official soundtrack, and he picked eight more for After Life 2 and After Life 3.  

As one of Hammock’s career defining works – the Mysterium, Universalis and Silencia trilogy – came to a close, the 2020 global pandemic of Covid-19, and the months of isolation it conscripted upon us, saw Byrd and Thompson recording at their homes, apart and with minimal equipment. Longing for escape, the purely ambient album Elsewhere emerged as the band sought a gateway to another place and to materialize universal feelings of separation and loss. Key track “What You Need Isn’t There” was picked up by SiriusXM and has received hundreds of thousands of performances to date.

In 2023, shaken awake and needing to break free of frustrations and longings, Hammock released Love in the Void. The album, the band’s loudest to date, pulses with an unbridled spirit for action and experience and a burning desire for connection. Across songs that hammer home the keenly felt emotions of life’s highs and lows, Byrd and Thompson crest soaring crescendos awash in reverb and delve to keenly felt moments of quiet introspection. The release charted in both Billboard US and OCC UK Top 100 albums and received significant coverage upon release, including features in Guitar World Magazine, Rock Sound, RTÉ Behind the Music, RTL Radio, Total Guitar, Analogue, Brooklyn Vegan, and PROG, and praise from guitarists Devin Townsend and Yvette Young.

On October 25, 2024, the band released “From the Void”, a collection of 8 songs, 4 of which were drawn from the “Love in the Void” recording sessions and 4 others inspired by the album.

May 16, 2025 brought the announcement of their next album, “Nevertheless”. Across 11 ambient guitar string, and piano works, ethereal light crests and contrasts with darkness, giving shape to physical forms and feelings. Amidst sorrow and grief, melodic motifs and refrains echo from the past to reanimate dreams and faded memories. As Nevertheless asks questions of permanence and purpose, beauty takes shape in the intangible—the traceless connections that gave, and give, meaning.

The Second Coming Was A Moonrise, announced on March 25, 2026 for a May release, continues those sensations of exploration, feeling at once like one of their most intimate releases while exploring the rich sense of majesty that they can create in turn. Following soon after their 2025 release Nevertheless, their self-production, in combination once again with mixer Emery Dobyns to accentuate the textured flow of their work, covers ten songs that sound like deep spaceflight in many forms, whether it’s the extended drone rise concluding “The Unsetting Sun” or the vast sensations of “Everything You Love Is Buried In The Ground Or Scattered Into Space.”

When asked about this sense of reaching out to the beyond, Byrd discusses the striking origin of the album title, also the name of the album’s longest song and one of its most calmly powerful. One night when younger, he and a friend, while indulging in some LSD, were momentarily affected by a light in the night sky, the fundamentalist Christianity of their upbringing leading them to expect the Rapture at any moment. It was, Byrd quickly realized, a moonrise in the end, but as he notes, the mere fact that they had that as their baseline was grounds for a reflective moment:

“If anyone grew up a fundamentalist, maybe this album can be a soundtrack for letting go of toxic shame and bad religion, while holding onto what is good, beautiful and true. Seeing and experiencing a moonrise is a miracle in itself. How many times do we miss what’s there or what’s being said by someone because we assume or believe something else is happening or being said?”

As has often been the case with their work, much of The Second Coming is instrumental or only adds wordless vocal sighs and textures, though always with titles chosen with intent. When the words come, they hit all the harder. “Like Sinking Stars” interprets the experience of a tornado hitting Thompson’s home and studio, while Byrd revisited more of his drug-fueled escapes from narrow-minded small town repression with “Chemicals Make You Small.” The latter features two notable guests that aren’t strangers to similar sonic and youthful experiences: Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, adding vocals and keyboards. Other returning guest performers include regular collaborator Matt Kidd of Slow Meadow adding strings and guitar, Deserta’s Matthew Doty on synths and guitar, Chad Howat playing keyboards and bass and Jake Finch adding some remarkable drumming.

It all adds up into another involving example of Hammock’s ability to embrace seriousness with warmth, a dreaminess that has heft, a beautiful glaze of sound that invites reflection and connection. When asked to describe what Hammock aims for now with The Second Coming Was A Moonrise and with where their creative journey has taken them, Byrd talks about creating something that “feels like a combination of what we’ve done through the years, with maybe a little more solidity,” appropriate in a time of personal changes in their lives and in the unsettled common state of the world in these years.

“So much is missed and looked over due to the tunnel vision created by politics, social media, algorithms, silos of misinformation, and perpetual distraction,” Byrd adds. “I would hope this could be an album that sounds like sitting on the roof of a car, when being young was serious and one night was like the end of the world. In a way, it’s the same old Hammock but new and maybe even incautious.”