Hamo & Tribute 2 Love

Hamo & Tribute 2 Love is a five-piece blues-rock band from Ljubljana, active since 2006. It is led by the singer and guitarist Matevž Šalehar, whose cheerful stage alter ego is Hamo. The nickname goes back to a mix-up in a Greek goldsmith's shop, where a suspicious owner set off the alarm: "Hamas" soon became "Hamo". The band is known for humour, tenderness and sincerity, and for its own word for love, "lubezen".

The band first wrote in English and later switched to Slovene. Hamo has said that when they did, very few of the English-speaking listeners stayed and the audience became younger. Their first release was an unofficial live album, The Bootleg (2009), and the first studio album, Dve (2013), still mostly in English, brought "Rožice" and "Dejva bit čist bliz". Pol followed in 2015 (on CD as Pol S), with "Greva še mal dlje" and a song with Gospa Magister.

The third album, 3p (2017), came out on the day of their first sold-out concert at Kino Šiška in February 2017, where the small vinyl run sold out at once. Critics praised it as one of the most sincere records of recent years, with songs such as "Dolgo nisva pila", "Zabluzu", "Vreme za lubezen" and "Telo". That summer the band won the Zlata piščal award for artist of the year.

4K (2019), the most varied album of the band and the first with the current line-up, deals with ecology and materialism and includes "Pomlad", "Prva vrsta", "Srce ne more več" and "Kje gori". It was presented at three sold-out concerts at the Center slovanskih kultur in Ljubljana in October 2019. In 2021 came Iz4Kani skorlajv, an acoustic version recorded almost live in the studio. The fifth studio album, 22, premiered at Križanke on 22 May 2022, with "Mali mož (Čao sonce)", "Pusti mi prižgano luč", "Zato ker je mraz", "Vse lepo za vse" and their own take on "Temni svet", first sung by Ana Soklič.

Hamo & Tribute 2 Love play around fifty concerts a year and, by Hamo's own rule, no weddings or birthdays. On 28 August 2025 they played Križanke again at the 73rd Ljubljana Festival, with the RTV Slovenia Big Band in new arrangements by Tadej Tomšič. Besides Hamo, the line-up is Peter Dekleva on guitar, Uroš Škerl Kramberger "Hipi" on bass, Martin Janežič "Buco" on drums and Anže Zaveršnik on keyboards and saxophone, with Denis Horvat "Duki" on keyboards in the early 2020s.