For alt-country stars Divorce, home is where the art is

You could be forgiven for thinking today’s NME Cover shoot is the set of an experimental new kids’ TV show. Flashes of colour, giddy energy and old-school Miley Cyrus on the speakers brighten up the frosty Nottingham warehouse studio where we’re shooting Divorce, the hometown alt-country four-piece bouncing off each other between costume changes. It’s all very wholesome – until the chat erupts with discussion of the “weirdly” sexual pet tortoise belonging to singer/guitarist Felix Mackenzie-Barrow’s mother, and when fellow frontperson and bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell struts out in assless chaps. “I’m literally an assless chap myself,” the banter chamber replies. That’s putting the blue into Blue Peter.

This is the colourful world of Divorce, where nearly every sense plays a part in their music. “We try to make sure that everything we do is still sacred, visually, and that we love all of it,” Cohen-Towell tells NME. “Colours have feeling, and there’s a feeling attached to each colour,” continues guitarist and synth man Adam Peter Smith, himself a dabbling painter.

You’ll understand the meaning applied to every sensation when you hear their entrancing album ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’ – one of 2025’s most exciting debuts so far. Imagine the skyward arena alt-country of Boygenius, bedevilled with jagged grunge edges, a St. Vincent raised eyebrow, and chamber pop whimsy. In their own words, it’s a weird soup of “Wilco meets ABBA”.

“The culture of all things being based in London is toxic” – Tiger Cohen-Towell

It’s a concoction that dates to the band’s teen years, when Mackenzie-Barrow and Cohen-Towell met at 16 as part of the same theatre group. Divorce’s knack for the dramatic may come from this past, but music was always the pair’s most powerful bond. During stints as solo artists, Mackenzie-Barrow invited Cohen-Towell to support him at Nottingham’s legendary Bodega on the latter’s 18th birthday. “We had an instant connection,” remembers Cohen-Towell. “Growing up together informs you in a very unique way to know each other’s intricacies. As writers, that’s so important.”

Turning to their longtime musical partner, they continue: “I’ve always respected your ideas a lot and found your songwriting really compelling. Even when we were both really young and would look back and cringe at our songs, I thought there was so much promise in what you were doing.”

Yin balancing out yang, the two friends say their perspectives “fill each other’s blind spots”. This helps when one or the other might “lack the confidence to indulge in a certain thing or could do with a bit of extra belief”. Singer-songwriter Smith and Do Nothing guitarist Sandstrøm – also bred in Nottingham’s thriving DIY scene – joined the party in 2021 after playing in or being in the orbit of the songwriting duo’s past projects. During the enforced stillness of the pandemic, the unit got their shit together to get out of that all too familiar and frustrating feeling of “going nowhere”.

Getting out of Notts may have been the initial impetus for Divorce – now scattered between here, Brighton and Glasgow – but the city is an indelible part of them. When they formed, the band found themselves experimenting with who they really wanted to be, with lockdown only exaggerating their in-built feeling of isolation and independence. “Being from Notts, we’ve got a good scene here, but it’s quite small, and you certainly don’t feel much of an industry presence,” says Cohen-Towell.

The city has a tight-knit and “self-sustaining” community of artists, venues, promoters, labels and a local media that thoroughly gives a shit. They DIY and do it well, but what you may hear tends to have little resemblance to and catches little attention from the rest of the world. Aside from Sleaford Mods, Bru-C, Jake Bugg and Young T & Bugsey, the 21st century hasn’t had much of a “major hit rate of breakthrough acts from Nottingham,” as Sandstrøm puts it, though “that’s not through a lack of quality”.

That lack of eyes on Nottingham has made Divorce’s resilience second nature. “When you don’t get a lot of outside interest, you don’t have much choice but to make it yourself,” says Mackenzie-Barrow. What Smith calls a “really badly gate-kept” music industry in the city, with its glass ceiling getting ever lower and less transparent, has the band tired of seeing so much talent “unable to sustain a life in music because there isn’t that infrastructure”. That’s bad enough when the UK is already headed towards a landscape where music becomes “a pastime of people with the wealth to indulge in things that don’t earn them money,” as Mackenzie-Barrow warns, compounded by the “generational trauma” of the working class being told they can’t be “audacious” enough to be creative.

The now-BBC 6 Music darlings and NME 100 inductees hope their rising star will shine more light on the Notts scene. “The culture of all things being based in London is toxic,” adds Cohen-Towell. “You miss good talent if you’re only focussed on one area. It becomes easily commodified.”

With a fire lit and left to their own devices, Divorce were stunned by the sudden attention when the raucous road songs of their 2022 debut EP ‘Get Mean’ caused more than a flutter in the indie world. Soon, they were signed to EMI imprint Gravity Records for the much more full-bodied and country-tinged ‘Heady Metal’ EP – earning fawning praise from Self Esteem and support slots with Everything Everything and Bombay Bicycle Club. They truly found their footing on last year’s single ‘Gears’ – its punky, yearning blues bursting with the potential of what their debut album would fulfil.

“It was fighting against the idea of what a band is,” says Mackenzie-Barrow. “Do we have to write ‘band’ songs? Do we just relax into writing and figure it out afterwards?”

“If you lose yourself in [the music industry], you lose yourself up your own arse” – Felix Mackenzie-Barrow

Welcome to Goldenhammer: population Divorce, and soon, a worldwide community. In the rustic setting of North Yorkshire’s Calm Farm studios, the four pals hunkered down with producer Catherine Marks (Boygenius, Wolf Alice). Having learned to deal with the “existential dread” of touring life through forced proximity, the band itself has come to feel like home, no matter where they lay their weary heads. The irony of their name is that Divorce are very much a family, and Goldenhammer is their sanctuary.

Whether on the opener ‘Antarctica’ and its ode of driving through heartbreak to safety, or the promise in ‘Parachuter’ that “it only takes a moment for your life to change”, ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’ is a fireside album that pulls you close to its bosom. “We’ve definitely tried to encapsulate the idea and the look of life not being seen,” says Cohen-Towell, conjuring up images of “the inside of people’s houses,” inspired by claymation cheese-fiends Wallace & Gromit and the sentimental comedy masterclass of working-class life The Royle Family. “It’s the humour and human-ness in day-to-day life.”

Wanting to shake off the grim, gritty and often pretty murdery media depictions of their home turf in TV shows like Sherwood and This Is England and to add depth to the perceived “placelessness of the Midlands”, as Smith puts it, Divorce feel empowered in just being seen. In ‘Lord’, Cohen-Towell vulnerably sings about surrendering to love and lust, while the epic ‘Pill’ plays out sexual awakening from a long-distance queer relationship. “It’s a very binary-less environment that we have in the band,” Cohen-Towell says. “When we’re writing, we’re not thinking about gender or sexuality. A song is a song. Radical communication has been needed in order to write honestly and as well as we can. We all have our own repression.”

Jukebox-rattler ‘Hangman’ recalls Mackenzie-Barrow’s time working in a care home, mustering all the strength and kindness he could while “shuffling through the mess”. “It’s about the relationship that you build with the person you’re looking after, really caring about them and wanting to make life as easy as possible for them,” he says, “but also how much that takes out of you”.

“Radical communication has been needed in order to write honestly” – Tiger Cohen-Towell

The band have already lived a fair bit of life and gone through the mill of some gruelling jobs, which is what keeps them in check and amused by the spectre of fame. You’d have heard that on ‘All My Freaks’, the future festival anthem that lampoons the band themselves, puncturing what Cohen-Towell calls the “edible fiction of celebrity” and the douchery of those who think they’ve “made it”.

“That’s the way we stay grounded,” offers Mackenzie-Barrow. “By poking fun at the ridiculousness of it all. If you lose yourself in it, you lose yourself incredibly far up your own arse. I don’t think any of us would allow each other to get that way.”

We’d tip them as the Class of 2025’s ‘Most Likely To Do An English Teacher’ in breaking through with their magnetic outsider charm. But with the “quiet ambition” and modesty imbued in all Midlanders, their only goalposts are to crack on with album number two, play Glastonbury and just hang out.

“I know for me, it’s all the small moments,” says Mackenzie-Barrow. “Sitting in the van on your way to a show and looking around at these friends that you have, sitting in the garden in the house where we wrote the songs, having dinner together – those are the moments that feel like success. Luckily, nothing we do is driven by individual egos…”

“Not yet!” the family banter shouts back. “Maybe when we can start arguing about royalties…”

Divorce’s ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’ is released on March 7 via Gravity Records.

Listen to Divorce’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Andrew Trendell
Photography: Ed Miles
Label: Gravity Records/Capitol Records UK

The post For alt-country stars Divorce, home is where the art is appeared first on NME.