Drummer Kasper Sandstrøm reels off a list of the week’s excitements to me from his living room sofa: “We did a session at Abbey Road, we did a session at Maida Vale for Huw Stephens and Jo Whiley, we were on Sunday Brunch. We’ve been up and down the country via London often, and it’s been great to see the reaction to the songs.” Vocalist Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, rolling a cigarette and basking in some glorious spring sunshine, is also pleased with Goldenhammer’s initial reception. “It’s been really nice to have a lot of people reaching out and saying they like it. We haven’t really been playing a lot of the songs live on previous tours, so in that sense it still feels pretty fresh luckily.”
Felix suggests to me that their upcoming UK headline tour – which includes Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow, but sadly no Newcastle date just yet – will be the real test of Goldenhammer’s popularity, but in reality there’s little doubt these 12 new songs will go down a storm in a live setting. Intricate, moving and occasionally volatile, Goldenhammer follows a loose quest narrative and is destined to become one of this year’s standout albums in British music. There’s even early talk about a Mercury Prize nomination.
There’s a certain intuitiveness to Goldenhammer’s songs, heard best in Felix’s tonally rich yet imperfect vocals, as well as his occasionally baffling lyrical style. “I’m a seahorse / And I need a little sugar” Felix and co-vocalist Tiger Cohen-Towell sing in glorious standout 'Lord', a hook so impulsively anthemic it’s quite possible the ecstatic fans on their upcoming shows might not stop to appreciate the bizarre words they’re singing. “Writing in a sort of subconscious, naïve way feels creatively fruitful to us,” Felix tells me. “When we started the band there were times, certainly on a personal level, where I was trying to write for this band. Like, ‘oh, I’ve got to write for a band now’. I think as time’s gone on I’ve learnt to just relax on it a bit and allow stuff to come through and find its own meaning. I think we really tried not to overbake it too much. Often the first thought you have is the best one.”
Surprisingly, the album’s intriguing narrative framing as a journey to the mythical realm of ‘Goldenhammer’ only materialised after the entire record had been entirely written and recorded. “It was really an afterthought. We landed on 12 [songs] that felt like they belonged in the same world, but it was really a case of whittling down from a lot more songs. We all had a sense of what the album world was, but I think we hadn’t really put it into words until after we finished the process.” For Felix, making his art is an act of trusting his instincts, putting pen to paper and figuring out what his words mean later. “Neither me nor Tiger are people who tend to deliberate for months over each line. We tend to write the thing and kind of forget about it, and then a month later we’ll be like ‘oh, that meant that!’ It’s quite therapeutic.”
Kasper doesn’t involve himself heavily with songwriting duties, but his involvement in the band is no less interesting, given his experience as a guitarist in the starkly different post punk band Do Nothing. “I hadn’t played drums in eight years before we started [Divorce]. A lot of people say I play the drums like a guitarist.” Why make such a radical switch? “We forced him into it!” Felix interjects between drags of a cigarette. In fact, Kasper, Felix and Tiger worked together for a charity album during lockdown for Nottingham’s Hockley Hustle festival and Kasper had occasionally played drums for Felix and Tiger’s original duo Megatrain. "Post lockdown I would have probably said yes to anything, but I’m glad I said yet to this," he says. "Exploring a different style of music is always fun."
In fact, Felix and Tiger have been writing songs together when they were 18, having met whilst at a youth theatre in Nottingham. Their creative longevity is audible throughout Goldenhammer in the way their contrasting vocal styles complement one another effortlessly, and in their knack for writing interlocking harmonies like on gorgeous opener ‘Antarctica’. “We’ve had to learn to make space for each other’s differences as writers and celebrate those things,” Felix says. “It feels like we’ve never really had to think too hard about how things fit together, whether that’s harmonies or lyrics. I think often we’ve been living fairly parallel lives, and that means that our songs end up being about quite similar things. When I’m writing for Divorce I have a small version of Tiger in my head, and I think the same for Tiger [about Felix]. We write separately and together, and that often doesn’t feel that different.” They can almost write from each other’s perspectives at this point, I remark. “To some extent,” Felix says, taking a moment to consider his words. “I think it’s more just that our perspectives are quite similar, but they have enough variation to make [the songs] exciting. Sometimes I’m like ‘what would Tiger do here?’”
Despite their musical chemistry, there are indeed some moments on Goldenhammer that feel like clearly the work of one of the two songwriters. ‘Pill’, for example, is Tiger’s oblique celebration of their queer identity, shifting from murky art rock to a piercingly intimate piano ballad in the album’s outstanding moment of creative risk-taking. Felix, for his part, is the driving force behind ‘Hangman’, a superbly catchy single about his six month stint as a support worker. “The admiration I have for people who work in that job is enormous. It’s incredibly overlooked as a sector of society, and timely right now given that the government is slashing disability benefits again,” he tells me, before accusing the Labour government of turning out to be as just as awful as the Tories were. “[‘Hangman’] came from an overwhelming desire to care for someone, and the tension was in how I was able to do that whilst also looking after myself. I was very numb at the time, because you kind of have to be to some extent.”
With those words, Felix freezes. It turns out he’s not mulling over the intense introspection required to produce a song as powerful as ‘Hangman’ – instead, my Wi-Fi has apparently gone down, and I’m promptly dumped out of the call. Still, I feel the 20 minutes have been enough for me to gain a new insight into Divorce, in particular Felix’s writerly thoughtfulness and Kasper’s admirable drive to simply play the music he loves, regardless of his instrument. Our chat has ended prematurely but make no mistake, Divorce are just getting started.
Divorce's UK and Europe tour starts on Thursday, and includes Leeds' Brudenell Social Club on 4 April.