Okay, okay, okay everyone settle down and I’ll explain.
In an effort to connect further to our Polish crooked forest tree roots, we’ve been working on our Polish and listening to more Polish bands… like this one!
We came across Polish folk-punk/folkcore band Hańba! (which translates to Disgrace if we’re to believe Google Translate; We’re all learning something new today and I think that’s nice) after firing off a tweet in the place that shall not be named calling for Polish bands to emerge from whatever part of the globe they’re hiding in so that we can expand our musical palette. A user named Karoryfer came to our rescue and mentioned this band so we scurried over to their bandcamp page to check out their most recent release.
Kryzys by Hańba! arrived in May 2023 and it’s a lot of fun in a sort of dystopian nightmare kind of way. Admittedly we didn’t understand a single lick of what their vocalist was saying, but this band has a very cool grungey-folkpunk-polka sound that you can’t help but be drawn into.
When we looked up the translation of the album title, the vibe of the record made a lot of sense. It means Crisis and that peeked just enough intrigue to make us want to dive a little further and see what exactly inspired the songs on the record. While we haven’t had the pleasure yet of speaking to the band directly, their lyrics are fortunately listed in English so we can’t butcher them in translation.
Argubaly my favourite are the first words spoken on the record during track 2: Refleksja.
There are two serious reasons
– Jerzy Paczkowski, translated by Mateusz Nowicki
Why I got sick of Poland:
Too much of holy water
Too little of plain soap
There is still a lot to explore with Hańba! but those opening couplets, in all their beautiful simplicity, say so much to me about the subtle genius that sits within this album and band and I really want to encourage you to check them out. You don’t need to understand what the band is saying outright to feel the emotional turmoil riddled within its songs and appreciate their willingness to share their life’s perspective.
Hańba! are from Kraków, Poland and you can learn more about them by checking out their social media pages below. Their next listed tour dates show them travelling through Germany in February before returning to Poland in March 2024.
Karoryfer by the way runs a cool record label called… yeah, you guessed it, Karoryfer Lecords, so you should check them out if you’re interested in exploring some other great music that probably isn’t on your radar yet.
Thanks for the recomendation, Karoryfer!
Crooked Forest 