Hawkwind Returns with There Is No Space For Us
Celebrating the prog legends’ 37th studio album
When assessing the new studio work of any legacy musical act, I have one single criteria: If someone had never heard anything else by this artist, could this new record make them a fan?
Think about that, okay? I believe that’s the least we should expect from a musician, whether they’re Bob Dylan or Blue Öyster Cult, Elvis Costello or Martha Argerich. You must imagine that the album is being heard by entirely fresh ears: Would it make someone go, I want to know more, I want to hear more, I am excited for this artist to be in my life?
If the artist is Hawkwind and the album in question is There Is No Space For Us, the band’s 37th (!) studio album, the answer is an adamant, “Fuck, yes.”
And here’s something amazing: There Is No Space For Us is Hawkwind’s third new studio album in just two years, and all three meet this extraordinary criteria. And although some may find this comparison extreme, I recall feeling this was when Scott Walker released Soused, or Bob Dylan put out Rough and Rowdy Ways: Although history is everything for these kind of deep, exceptional legacy artists, these albums defied history. They could stand on their own. And this, remarkably, is also true of Hawkwind’s most recent trio of albums. Well over half a century since they lifted off, Hawkwind are having a almost unprecedented, late, late, late in life career renaissance. Honestly: if you only began to attend to Hawkwind in 2023, their last three albums — The Future Never Waits, Stories From Time and Space, and now There Is No Space For Us — would suffice to describe an entire genius career, an entire catalog complete in two years, of magical, enchanting, deep and challenging classic and modern trance rock.
Ah, but let’s focus on the brand new album: There Is No Space For Us is a bubbling, enchanting, trancey yet melodic album; full of long, almost furiously engaging instrumental passages (what do we call the place where ambience and energy join hands?) laced with near-sugary bursts of infectious and effecting melody and deep, sometime melancholy text. It blends Hawkwind’s legendary affection for thump and pulse with a constant undercurrent of Orbital-like percolation, ambience, star-scaping and city-noise. Throughout, Hawkwind display an extraordinary ability to mix elements of charged chill-out with a persuasive pressure, energy, ecstasy, and foreboding, creating a kind of massive, engaging, environmental classic rock that soars, sluices, churns, bubbles, slices, chills, elates, wraps around you, lifts you, and makes you believe you are in the presence of greatness. Not bad for a band led by an octogenarian, yeh?
Now, the weight of Hawkwind’s extraordinary 56-year career is so profound that to fully appreciate the wondrous new album, maybe you need to disregard most or all of it. When assessing what the band have been doing recently — essentially, since keyboardist/sonic architect Tim “Thighpaulsandra” Lewis joined the group in 2021, which seems to have been the point where the band tipped into a renewed greatness — you must regard that considerable history as a foundation, but not a reference point or point of comparison. That’s because something remarkable is going on with Hawkwind, right in the here and now. I’ll flat-out say this: A playlist of the last three Hawkwind albums — those are the ones they released since April of 2023 — would totally suffice as any other band’s Greatest Hits album (volumes I and II!). I mean that. And I believe these last three albums — The Future Never Waits, Stories From Time and Space and There Is No Space For Us — have to be viewed as a trilogy, which is, I think, how the band and 83 (!) year old band leader, primary guitarist and lead vocalist Dave Brock wants them to be seen. There are repeated lyrical and even melodic themes throughout the three records, and even though each album is quite different — remarkably so, actually — they still “feel” like they’re of a piece (and putting them all on one playlist and hitting “shuffle” bears that out). The Future Never Waits was strange, grasping, chaotic, alternately angry and delicate, at times industrial, other times jazzy, and still other times ambient; Stories From Time and Space is, by far, the most “song”-oriented of the trilogy (when I first heard it, I scribbled the note, “Remember that Stereolab album of Steve Miller covers produced by Goldley and Crème? This is it!”), while also being the most “traditionally” Hawkwind-ish of the three (i.e., it featured more of the power-chord, quadruple-time rave-ups the band pioneered and, essentially, trademarked); and the new one, well, it’s just a fucking environmental/emotional delight, evoking ambient/techno/Berlin Berghain via Hayden Planetarium investigations the band engaged in the first half of the 1990s, without repeating any of them. Throughout all three albums, Hawkwind investigate different sides of the Dystopian/Utopian space age nightmare/dreamland the band have been describing for over half a century, and which now seems more relevant than ever.
(Oh, and before you get too distracted by my use of the word “ambient,” There Is No Space For Us does contain at least one song that belongs on any Hawkwind all-time highlights playlist: the chiming, bubbling (there’s that word again, but it’s a good descriptive of the resonant undercurrent of this whole album), charging and mega-melodic “Changes,” which simultaneously echoes both 1972’s “Space Is Deep” and 1980’s “Levitation”…which is to say it is one helluva a classic/melodic/road-musik space rock song.)
For a moment, let’s return to the ol’ weight of history, because Hawkwind has a lot of that, and it would seem downright odd to write about Hawkwind without at least touching a little on the backstory, nicht was? If you know Hawkwind at all, especially if you’re an American, it’s very likely because of the four earth-shattering studio records and one legendary live album they released between 1971 and 1975. During that time, like the Velvet Underground (slightly before them) or Kraftwerk (alongside them), Hawkwind were doing nothing short of crafting, writing and re-writing a new vocabulary for the language of rock. Uh-huh. It is far, far too simple to state that Hawkwind were the missing link between Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols (a common description of their sound in the first half of the 1970s), since that minimizes how singular their invention was, or re-phrases it within the context of other people’s work. It may be more accurate to say that Hawkwind, during this period, created mind-expanding/brain-numbing planetarium punk (before there was such a thing as punk), throbbing, noisy/seductive music that was alternately — and simultaneously — dreamy, ecstatic, throttling, melodic, full of stars and sledgehammers, drones and drills, mystery and mayhem. Like the Velvets (or, later on, Stereolab or Glenn Branca), Hawkwind would play a chord until some kind of exhaustive or orgasmic peak had been reached; it was profoundly personal, yet performative music that took the most primal, essential experience of rock’n’roll — or Wagner or La Monte Young or Bo Diddley — and beat it into the earth and shouted it to the sky.
And for a lot of people (especially again, sadly, Americans, where Hawkwind remains a cult, as opposed to the U.K., where they are a way of life), all that really “mattered” about Hawkwind was the first half of the 1970s (which are sometimes referred to as “the U.A. era,” or just “Lemmy-era Hawkwind”). But that’s not where the story ended, not remotely, and Dave Brock and Hawkwind have virtually always kept moving, making sure that every time they enter a studio they have an interesting and unique contribution to make, even if it’s not immediately obvious., Hawkwind’s vast catalog is fucking deep, and even a random dip reveals anything from twisted middle eastern ambience to Roxy-esque pop to gnashing melodic metal to music concrete. I mean (and here, I suppose, I confess I’m really addressing Hawkwind fans), when’s the last time you listened to the It’s The Business of the Future to be Dangerous (1993) and 1995’s The White Zone, both of which are awesomely trippy and incredibly brave, and give significant hints to the landscape of the three albums the band have made since 2023? And on and on. And on. And on. But this is the problem when you write anything with the word “Hawkwind” in it. There’s a lot to Hawkwind, and it’s kind of miraculous that they’re still at (or goddamn near) the top of their game. For theloveofgod, the band debuted two months after Woodstock.
Hawkwind aren’t just one of the very greatest bands of the rock era; they’re not just incredibly diverse, engaging, always in motion and fucking strange; they’re not merely the literal inventors of a kind of mono-chord jamband-ism and pummeling space rock that left its’ mark on anyone who wanted to play one or two chords or a simple riff until they found Shambhala; they have also, 56 years after they started and 55 years since their first album, made an album that requires No Fucking Introduction.
And how many legacy acts can you say that about?
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