Ramonda Hammer releases “I Never Wanted Company”

On Ramonda Hammer’s raw, searing debut album “I Never Wanted Company,” front-woman Devin Davis takes a hard look at her internal struggle between despairing loneliness and embracing independence.
The Los Angeles quartet’s blistering guitars and Davis’s paint-peeling vocals – equally recalling past greats like Hole and like-minded contemporaries like Mannequin Pussy – form a strong support for lyrics that grapple with two years of emotional upheaval for Davis. Since the band released their 2017 EP “Destroyers,” a record that cemented Ramonda Hammer as a tentpole act in L.A.’s surging community of woman- and queer-fronted bands, Davis struggled to come to terms with her codependency, fought against her own impulse to get overwhelmed by her own over-analysis, and got into her first queer relationship.

The result is an album that’s bruising, cathartic, searching, and ultimately therapeutic. The quartet – Davis on vocals and guitar, Justin Geter on guitar, Andy Hengl on bass and Mark Edwards on drums – has never sounded more powerful, providing a muscular frame for Davis’s cutting observations on her own life.

“No one is coming! No one!” she wails at the end of lead single “Hoax.” On its face, it’s a bleak and almost nihilistic statement – but then, it’s also a call to independence from the singer. She openly attempts to balance her need for others with her own self-reliance throughout the album. On “Relativity,” she muses, “I want to love myself the most, and still get fucked by you the most.”

Meanwhile, “Better View” displays moments of Davis learning the nature of a relationship with a non-binary partner. With her trademark sass, she says “I adore you better when we’re talking shit outside,” and then adds, “and you ignore the effort when I’m on my knees.” Similarly on the waltz “A Dramatization,” Davis starts the song, “I did a hard thing, but I don’t get hard now.”

“Those are pretty sexual things,” Davis explains. “I don’t write lyrics about sex too much, but it’s an important part of attraction, understanding identity, and the difference between hetero and queer relationships – especially a queer relationship with a person who doesn’t identify with the body they were born into.”

“I Never Wanted Company” is clearly a document of a songwriter and a band refining a true and honest sound. Ramonda Hammer have become central to a burgeoning L.A. scene the band helped build over the last few years, a scene which in turn has begun launching its bands onto the national stage. But it’s also a personal document for Davis, and one she hopes to offer as a guide to people who want to take better control over their own lives and emotions.

“I’m an anxious person,” Davis says. “It helps me to play loud, loud, loud rock music with gritty sounds and brash lyrics. I want to challenge people, and help them find independence and self-acceptance. Sometimes you need people to scream at you – in a loving way – to wake you up.”