DIVORCE

For Nottingham quartet Divorce, home is a feeling. The band, made up of Tiger Cohen-Towell (vocals / bass), Felix Mackenzie-Barrow (vocals / guitar), Adam Peter Smith (guitar & synth) and Kasper Sandstrøm (drums), has spent much of their lifespan on the road. They met as teenagers through the city’s close-knit DIY scene but came together as Divorce in mid-2021, releasing a slew of genre-defiant singles that quickly caught the attention of Hand In Hive (TV Priest, Tancred, Wyldest). The years since have been breathless. In 2023 they signed to Gravity Records (Universal Music) for their acclaimed Heady Metal EP and sold out their first UK headline run off the back of it. Their 2024 schedule was filled with a raft of international festivals, a SXSW showcase, tours with Bombay Bicycle Club, The Vaccines and Everything Everything, rounding off with their biggest headline show to date at London’s Islington Assembly Hall.

It wasn’t until they came to demo their debut album, Drive to Goldenhammer, that they finally had the breathing space to sit down as a band, as friends, and block out the rest of the world. “Everything up until that point, as wonderful and surprising and fulfilling as it had been, felt like we were being dragged through a hedge backwards – in a nice way!” says Tiger. The result is a pastoral blend of country, folk and chamber pop that traces the upheaval of the last few years while planting roots in their own sound. “When your life is transient and always moving, you look for that kind of solace in the songs that you write, because that's all you've got that stays constant,” Felix explains. Sonically rich and lyrically open-hearted, Drive to Goldenhammer sees Divorce assemble a shelter for themselves amid the chaos and leave the front door open to everyone.

First track “Antarctica” introduces the album with a flurry of laughter, beckoning you inside like the cosy glow of a packed pub on a miserable night. From there, the album explores themes of personal upheaval and transformation across 12 meticulously crafted tracks that balance heart-on-sleeve sentiments and tongue-in-cheek humour, devastation and playfulness, all- consuming feelings that they know will pass. “I think the theme of movement runs through a lot of our work, because we are inherently quite restless in our lives and subsequently in our songs,” Tiger reflects.

Drive to Goldenhammer’s tender atmosphere comes partly from its production. Demoed at The Calm Farm, a residential studio space in North Yorkshire, the development period was domestic bordering on familial. The 1960s-built house is rural and quiet, set apart from the rush of the world (its website boasts “the worst mobile phone reception you’ve ever seen). They ate at the same times, slept in the same rooms, and settled into a rhythm that allowed them to work on the tracks in a way that felt “really improvisational and momentary.” The same intimacy carried over to the recording process with Catherine Marks (boygenius, Manchester Orchestra, Wolf Alice), which was also done as a residency, allowing them to mirror moments of inspiration at the Farm on record. “Parachuter”, which is delicately arranged around Felix and Tiger’s harmonised vocals and sways like an Americana lullaby, was recorded late at night, replicating the time they originally wrapped the demo.

“There were a few songs that took a bit of persuasion to get where they needed to be, but most of them felt so fluid,” Adam explains, saying the set-up allowed them to follow the songs where they wanted to go. “We’d work through two or three a day, and those would be the demos. We wouldn’t touch them again until we recorded them, and even then it was only to add seasoning. The bones of everything stayed true to what came out in the moment.”

Intuition is in many ways the bedrock of Drive to Goldenhammer, whose “ lyrical themes are the anchor, rather than the sound of it,” as Kasper puts it. The band visited The Calm Farm four times over the course of a year, working there across all seasons. “I think the album feels like it does a lap of a year too,” says Tiger. “There’s songs that are really dark and thematically sombre, and there are songs that are really sunwashed.”

An example of the latter is lead single “All My Freaks,” which skewers the ego of the music industry with radiant synths, bright riffs and British irreverence (“Stepping into no man’s land can be heavy / So I go on the back of my jetski / And science doesn’t impress me”). “When you dip a toe into the world of artists that are doing pretty well, you meet some interesting characters. It does things to people... and we haven't experienced that before but it’s a fun thing to laugh at, because you’ll cry if you don’t!” Tiger says. “The song is pretty unserious lyrically, but sonically I’m super proud of it because we really locked in as a four. It felt like the first time we’d ever fully done that.”

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, “Hangman” takes a snapshot of a time when Felix was working in the care sector, overworked and overwhelmed. “It felt like the hardest and most rewarding job I've ever had to do,” he explains. “It was fundamentally about caring for someone and wanting to have a perceivable positive impact on their life, and in the process kind of losing some ego.” Written on Tiger’s omnicord in a room “getting taken over by black mould and mildew,” the song came straight from the heart, its earnest core fleshed out with rolling drums, jukebox “ahhhs” and jangle guitars that come down like bursts of rain. “It felt like I’d just finished a shift, wrote that song, woke up five minutes later and went to work again. It was still dark and I was listening to that song over and over again, and it kind of got me through that day.”

The same vulnerability is there on “Lord,” a brooding folk country track that feels its way through the start of Tiger’s first queer relationship. “It’s kind of about, uh, being horny,” they laugh. “It's just about being vulnerable, but also being very far away from someone and missing them and feeling like a little squirt who has these extremely teenage feelings.” Its shifting verses and observant lyrics build to a release, finally bursting on a chorus that gives itself over to feelings: “Lord, I’m letting go.”

Still refusing to box themselves into a genre, Drive to Goldenhammer lays the Divorce “stamp” across a breadth of influences. “Fever Pitch” is a waltz of weaving riffs and vocal acrobatics that recalls St. Vincent, the moody acoustic introspection of “Karen” explodes into a wall of dirty alt rock, while “Pill” is a shape-shifting masterpiece of electronic glitches, string flourishes and 60s pop “bah, bah, bahhhs” topped off with a ripping guitar solo and a piano interlude. A few tracks are sprinkled with slide guitars, while “Old Broken String” and “Antarctica” are incorporated with fiddle parts by Chris Haigh (everyone is very excited about the fact that he wrote the main riff for “5,6,7,8” by Steps), which embellish the album’s pastoral imagery. It rises up in the middle of “Antarctica,” causing the track to bloom before underscoring the weight of its last heavy-hearted chorus (“I was made to love you / But the living made me weak”). It’s a fitting song to open the album. A lynchpin moment of endings and beginnings, “Antarctica” charts the end of a relationship while centring around an experience that Felix and Tiger had driving to his parents’ place in Derbyshire. They almost knocked over a newborn calf who had wandered into the middle of the road: “We carried her between us, skin and bone / And warmth and fur and afterbirth / Put her back behind the bars / We climbed inside the car / And barely said a word,” Felix and Tiger’s voices sing, hushed and harmonised, in unison. “It felt like insanely good symbolism,” Tiger laughs. “Even the timing of it felt like a huge pivotal moment, reminiscent of what we were all going through.”

For those wondering, “Goldenhammer” is a fictional place based on a composite of the band’s associations with the East Midlands and something about childhood memories which informs their work generally – whether it’s through cultural output like Wallace and Gromit or radio plays like The Archers, or the Nottingham DIY scene that fostered them growing up. “We’re very inspired by the culture within the regions that we're from, and the eerie nostalgia, the line between fiction and reality,” says Tiger. In turn, there’s a welcoming surrealism to the album, reflecting a side of the post-industrial Midlands that doesn’t often come across in pop culture. “We really wanted to make sure that warmth was something people could feel, because that is such a big part of the Midlands,” says Adam. “It is hard and industrial, but it’s also endearing and sweet. You’ll have this big burly bloke with the strongest accent in the world, and when you speak to him he'll be talking about his dog or his three daughters that he loves with all his heart.”

Like the spaces they recorded it in, the songs on Drive to Goldenhammer feel at ease and lived-in. That’s partly the result of the foundations being recorded live. That gives the album a natural warmth – something they deliberately wanted to bake into the album to reflect the band’s identity as it relates to the Midlands, but also as a fictional refuge from the world at large.

“Sometimes warmth is something that you have to make for yourself,” says Felix, adding that the folk, country and bluegrass influences on the album nod to an oral tradition of storytelling – one that is designed to be emotionally resonant so that it is remembered. “The world is increasingly hard and you have to find pockets of warmth. I think we wanted this album to be one of those pockets,” he continues. “I’m not interested in making it hard for someone to engage with what we're doing. I want to reach people in the way that other things have reached me.”

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