Some bands form out of ambition, others out of boredom. Hourglass came out of something else—something slower, heavier. Four longtime friends who’ve known each other for more than two decades, all tangled up in the French punk and hardcore underground.
Past bands include Rockin’bitch and Quietus. There were also stints in emo, screamo, and heavier metalcore outfits, but the core was always punk. So when they started Hourglass in 2024, it wasn’t a reinvention. It was more of a loop closing.
“For me, Hourglass is a back trip in my roots,” one of them says. “Making this music, with these guys, looked totally normal when we started the band. So, I think that’s a really natural evolution in our musical paths. We’re back home finally.”
They’ve got their first EP coming out on September 26. It’s called “The Beast Is a Boy.” Five tracks that sit somewhere between punk-hardcore and post-metal, or as they put it, “a punk-hardcore hand in a post glove.” The reference points come quickly: Comeback Kid, Defeater, Gojira, Converge, but also older stuff like Rancid and NOFX. The result isn’t some genre experiment—it’s more like a patchwork of what stuck after all these years.
The EP’s title track, “The Beast Is a Boy”, hits on something personal. “It talks about this little monster we all had inside as a child,” they explain. “This little beast makes us really emotional. We often were not able to control all these emotions. When we grow up, we think that this little beast will disappear, but sometimes, it’s still there, and you have to live as an adult with this little monster from your childhood. And that could be really difficult.”
That feeling—of being stuck between past and present, energy and burnout—threads through the record. “The main theme of the EP is the time passing,” they say. “The fact that we all are in our 40s now, and the nostalgia of our younger years. You know, we’re still doing some heavy music, exactly like when we were young, but we’re a little more exhausted at the end of the rehearsal. We see all our punk heroes gone old, and that’s a mirror for ourselves.”
The songs carry that weight without turning it into a crisis. There’s no melodrama, just an acknowledgment that time doesn’t wait, and it sure doesn’t hand out refunds. It’s about watching the people you looked up to age out of relevance—or vanish altogether—and realizing you’re in the same line.
They recorded the EP the only way they could. Drums went down at Studios Sapristi with their friend Sebastien Hahn, but the rest—guitar, bass, vocals—was tracked at home. “Paying a studio is really hard, and we can make really great things ourselves with today’s technology,” they say. “So, I think that mixing these two ways of recording is a good solution today.”
The real challenge isn’t in writing or recording—it’s in finding space to exist as a band at all. “It’s really difficult to start a band now around our location,” they admit. “We’ve lost most of the local venues since the last 20 years, so local bands have really no options to practice and play live.” The one upside: proximity to Belgium, where some venues and collectives are still keeping things alive.
“The Beast Is a Boy” showcases four friends making the music they never really stopped loving, even if their backs hurt more now. It’s about time—how much of it has passed, and how little you can do to slow it down. But also, what sticks. What stays.
