DROWSY - Growing Green

On his FatCat debut, twenty-two-year-old Finn Mauri Hakkinen (aka Drowsy) manages to surprise. Actually, it's not quite a debut: three years ago the talented youngster had already released the single "Careless Me" on FatCat (also included on this first album). Then, silence. "Growing Green" is thus the product of a rather long gestation, a collection of home-recorded material captured in strictly lo-fi fashion, a compendium of the kind of arte povera that has found the spotlight again over the last decade.

Living in a cold, dark country like Finland - vast and sparsely populated - inevitably invites the usual barrage of socio-psychological speculation: alienation, loneliness, melancholy, boozy nights, silence, nature. Well, at the risk of sounding trite, all of this is Drowsy - his music, his poetics. His is a minimal acoustic folk, in the purest lo-fi style, with a delicate melodic sensibility. There's day and night. The light of sinuous melodies and the sinister dark of drawn-out chords left to die away. It's a tendency whose greatest exponents include Will Oldham, and especially the Will Oldham/Bonnie "Prince" Billy of "I See A Darkness".

The album opens with "Some Cursing": a nocturnal voice, perhaps bordering on the overly mannered, settles over fingerpicking in the most classic singer-songwriter style, where every chord is left there, alone, to conjure emotion. This opening track alone is enough to draw you into and understand Drowsy's strange world: a wholly personal, a-rational world born of a fervid imagination. The same imagination sketched out in the cover artwork, which is meant to represent Drowsy himself, his room, and his relationship with the outside world. With "Harmless" the instrumentation changes: no more acoustic guitar, but piano. The melody, aided by an amateur-recording echo, seems to emerge from a cave; both terrifying and gloomy at once, "Harmless" is one of the first songs Mr Hakkinen wrote back in 2001, the year that marked the start of a "postal" relationship with FatCat that continued for the following three years and is summed up in this "Growing Green".

After a relatively flat middle section that raises the suspicion that our good Drowsy fired off his best shots at the start, we return to breathing in good music with "No Footprints To Trail", a lo-fi acoustic take on any given ballad from Maximilian Hecker's "Rose", followed by a return to the gloom of the opening with "I Died Of Death", whose title alone leaves no hope of salvation. A few little instrumental gems here and there, careful and restrained use of instrumentation in Drowsy's hands, more small acoustic melodic pearls, and the album closes with the 8 minutes of "Reclining The Minds Slowly Sway" (two of which are given over to silence) and the breezy "Home Hits".

The premises are good. The album is well balanced and comfortably holds up over its 58-minute runtime. It's still the debut work of a young singer-songwriter, who devoted a full three years to composing these 14 tracks, and the market rarely allows for such an extended timeline. It's hard to say whether "Growing Green" will remain a one-off in Mauri Hakkinen's career or just the beginning, but based on what we've heard, we wish him a long career.

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30/04/2026