You came away breathless. Just not in the good way — more like when someone is shouting jokes, flinging their arms around and playing dance-pop at the same time, and you sit there wondering: Is this a concert? Is it satire? Or is it just a man who really, really wants to entertain you?
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Hugorm’s concert at Tinderbox wasn’t just a concert. It was an attempt to stage the big moment. There was choreography. There were guests. There was fire. There was the state of the world. And then there was that kind of theatrical overcompensation that makes you want to shout: Stop, it’s just a concert — not a New Year’s address! The whole thing felt like a half-heavy pop catalogue being hoisted onto the shoulders of a Las Vegas show.
Simon Kvamm is, of course, an entertainer. He has played arenas, festivals and fictional radio DJs for two decades, and he knows his audience. But Hugorm’s live format wants to be punk, poetic and pop all at once — and that is more than the material can carry. The result is a TikTok crossfire between satire and seriousness, where Kvamm dances close with his buddy, performs a cover of “Freed From Desire” and shouts “Hugorm is on fire,” while Prisma (from Odense, naturally) stands in the background looking like extras in a DR3 experiment.
The energy is high. Eye contact, bro hugs, arms in the air. But it feels as if the songs simply don’t have enough heft to carry the grand gestures. It sounds like musical pop with potter’s-clay poetry and four-on-the-floor beats. There’s pressure, sure, but it sounds like something written for a script — not for the gut.
The most charming moment is actually when Prisma is invited on stage. A kind of local gimmick. But even that disappears into the overall need to keep the energy up at all times. There is no room for nuance. Not even silence. It’s contact, contact, contact. And four-on-the-floor. All the time.
Musically, Hugorm moves through a beat-driven landscape where the bass drum has the lead role. But it all starts sounding more and more like a musical — or maybe a Simon Kvamm Musical, where every character is a version of himself. It becomes theatrical in a slightly awkward way, where you never quite know whether it’s earnestness or performance. And maybe that is exactly the problem. Because you want to feel it. Instead, you end up sitting there clapping politely, thinking: That was quite fun. I think.
Let’s just put it like this…
Hugorm is trying very hard. Too hard. And you can’t blame them for wanting to throw a party. But when the party sounds like a revival of Les Misérables meeting Rasmus Nøhr, even the best beats lose a little of their weight.
