Meet Divorce, the Nottingham alt-country band finding home in a sound
The fast-rising quartet tell us about theatrical new single ‘Pill’ and the drama and yearning of imminent debut album ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’
Nottingham quartet Divorce have previously described themselves as “Wilco meets ABBA,” and list Belle & Sebastian and Queen among the inspirations for their new single, ‘Pill’. Mix all of these disparate parts together and you’re left with a band who transcend an earthy, mid-tempo indie sound with theatrical ideas and grand ambitions.
Their debut album, Drive To Goldenhammer, follows a series of hype-building EPs and viral moments, and lands on March 7 via Capitol subsidiary Gravity. Its titular place encapsulates the band’s ambition to dream past their immediate surroundings and look beyond the horizon.
“It’s a home that doesn’t really exist,” the band’s Felix Mackenzie-Barrow tells Rolling Stone UK. “I don’t know if any of us would be able to summarise exactly what this place looks like or who inhabits it, because I think we’re on the way there. Everything we’re doing is always part of the journey towards it.”
Listen to ‘Pill’, and read our interview with Mackenzie-Barrow and co-songwriter Tiger Cohen-Towell – about their evolution as a band, the mythical Goldenhammer, why they are “the perfect antidote” to each other’s songwriting and more – below.
Your debut album is called Drive To Goldenhammer – what did you want to convey in this mystical, fictional place?
Tiger: We had an idea about the album being called ‘Drive To…’ something, and we liked the drama of that as a title, because it felt sort of like a play. We wanted to have this eerie nostalgia to the album. We both have an acting background, and we chose visually to have a hint of vaudeville in the theme. Goldenhammer came from a lyric in one of the songs.
Goldenhammer is supposed to be a place, but the emphasis that we wanted was the journey, and for that to be the feel and theme of the album, as opposed to the place. There is mystery around where Goldenhammer is, and what it is. It’s this intangible idea of something that you yearn for and want.
Felix: It’s a home that doesn’t really exist. I don’t know if any of us would be able to summarise exactly what this place looks like or who inhabits it, because I think we’re on the way there. Everything we’re doing is always part of the journey towards it.
Despite it being fictionalised, are there parts of your real life and the places you grew up present in what you’re portraying?
Tiger: The album is very inspired by Nottingham and Derby in the East Midlands. We wanted the title to really be focused on a journey, and as people from the East Midlands, which is largely a nationally forgotten place, we’ve always been running away from that. As we get older, we realised that the whole world over is the same, and that you have to find that home for yourself. It’s not gonna just be somewhere else.
Tell us about your new single, ‘Pill’.
Tiger: It’s quite an unconventional choice for a single – it was the quintessential album track from when we recorded it. The structure is so unconventional, but I think that it’s got a magic about it. It’s got three sections that jump massively in arrangement and vibe. It’s not got a chorus. It’s just basically three mini songs.
The lyrics are super gay, and they jump in time. It’s so theatrical. It’s so, so camp in its essence. It’s so extra, but it means a lot to me personally. The lyrics are about my queer experience, and also about my first queer relationship. They’re very, very raw. It was such a playful, fun and wholesome experience to write it.
Felix: It’s exactly the kind of song that we wouldn’t have had the space to write without writing an album. Writing this album gave us the time to carve something out that has looser structure – we were just following the emotion in it and trying to stretch the boundaries of what a song could be in our minds. It’s become a big song for the album and is a real marker of where we’re at.
The primary influences were Perfume Genius, Belle & Sebastian and Queen. That surmises how insane the song felt when recording it. I don’t think it’s actually sonically turned out that insane, but it was just such a nice stab in the dark to do a track like this.
You’ve received some massive support since you started, now signing with EMI. How has the band changed since you started, and do you see that as a natural evolution regardless of outside factors, or have you been able to positively evolve because of the support you’ve received?
Felix: We were always going to do this stuff, whether we got that support or not, but we didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.
Tiger: I think the freedom that the support has given us has definitely defined a lot of what we’re doing. It’s given us the headspace, and although it’s been chaos, it’s been that support that has meant that we had time to really flesh out the songs in the way that we wanted to all in the same room and be able to go to an inspiring space to do that.
It’s sort of felt like we’ve been dragged through many hedges, but, like, in a nice way. We just did what we do best and wrote about our experiences. It’s all pretty true to our lives.
Felix: We’d been trying to be musicians for a long time, and things gaining momentum quite quickly was a really great opportunity that we didn’t really see coming. The initial mindset was that we were going to have to work really hard for a long time before anyone took any notice of us, because that was how we were familiar with things working. It’s been an exercise in maintaining a discipline of keeping on working just as hard and using the opportunities when they come. We’ve all spent so long waiting for or working for those opportunities, so know the value of them and threw ourselves into it.
How has your songwriting partnership evolved through these years, and what did you learn about each other through making this album, especially after both your lives must have changed a lot?
Felix: It’s such a grounding thing. Me and Tiger have been writing lyrics together since we were like teenagers. Even pre-Divorce, we’ve often found that we’ve been in little pockets of life where we’re going through really similar things, but both have such different instincts in terms of the way we describe things. That’s been such a brilliant thing about writing together – it reframes certain things. I know that I can get myself into a real hole with certain things, or have certain patterns in my brain that I have to try and unpick sometimes. Tiger’s approach to songwriting is the perfect antidote to that – it allows me to relax and let that open up.
Tiger: I feel the same. I have a lot of trust in Felix whereby I can bring him a song that I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this is interesting enough’, and you just always know exactly what to tweak, or add, or throw away. I just have so much trust in your taste and your approach.
Felix: A lot of the most brilliant things on the record that I love will come up in the spur at the moment. Someone just had a fucking brainwave, and it’s always those bits, when I listen back to the record, that feel like the anchor points that make you feel proud of the album.
Tiger: That’s what leaves you all feeling really excited and happy with it. There’s a beautiful time period where the songs are yours. By the time the album comes out, we’ll all have listened to them enough to realise we don’t want them to be just ours anymore. For now, it’s a very special, personal time when you’re just incubating the songs.