There are records that knock politely. "Hypomaniac" kicks the door, apologises mid-riot, then asks if you noticed how beautifully the walls vibrated while falling. This debut by Nebbia, Almeida, and Darrifourq is free jazz in a state of productive overstimulation: not chaos for chaos’ sake, but a nervous system pushed just far enough to start telling the truth.

Recorded live in Thessaloniki during defkaz’s "Take 2" festival, the album carries that specific electricity only festivals generate: the sense that something might derail at any second, and that everyone involved secretly hopes it will. Hypomania, after all, is not madness but acceleration - ideas arriving faster than etiquette allows. This trio doesn’t cure it; they ride it like a stolen motorcycle.

Camila Nebbia’s saxophone is the album’s unstable narrator. Her lines don’t declaim; they test the air, bending tradition without snapping it. There’s free jazz lineage in her phrasing, yes, but also a contemporary clarity - she’s not trying to escape history, she’s dragging it into the present by the collar and asking it to breathe faster. Her sound can be tender, then suddenly serrated, as if lyricism itself had a caffeine problem.

Gonçalo Almeida treats the double bass less as an instrument and more as a fault line. He oscillates between deep groove and abrasive density, making the bass throb, grind, protest. At times it feels amplified beyond physics, flirting with noise yet never abandoning pulse. This is important: "Hypomaniac" grooves. Hard. Even when it’s tearing itself apart, it taps its foot.

Sylvain Darrifourq, meanwhile, operates like a nervous system with sticks. His drumming is in constant motion, always alert, always threatening to combust - but it never does. Instead, it hypnotises. He understands restraint as a form of violence: sudden silences, brittle textures, rhythmic feints that keep the music hovering at red alert without tipping into collapse.

The four tracks - titled only by their durations, a small but telling refusal of narrative comfort - unfold like weather systems. They don’t develop so much as "accumulate". Motifs appear, vanish, mutate. Collective improvisation here isn’t polite conversation; it’s three minds overlapping, interrupting, finishing each other’s sentences badly and brilliantly.

There’s something refreshing, even darkly funny, about how seriously this trio takes intensity. No spiritual platitudes, no heroic poses - just three musicians trusting that excess, when handled with skill, can still be precise. "Hypomaniac" doesn’t offer catharsis; it offers momentum. You don’t come out calmer. You come out sharper.