Home is where Divorce is

“I’m really excited to take the pasta bake out of the oven. That’s right next for us,” jokes guitarist Adam Peter Smith, prompting laughter and faux-sincerity from his bandmates, who underline the importance of the dish on their upcoming tour. “It will be mostly pasta bake on tour for us for ages,” says Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, guitarist and co-lead vocalist. It’s a moment that takes you back to teenage sarcasm, when nothing is funnier than committing to the bit. It’s a moment, too, that seems to capture the essence of this indie outfit: earnest, ordinary, and grounded in lives shared. Divorce are a band adept at finding joy in the most mundane aspects of life.

Completed by Tiger Cohen-Towell (bass and co-vocals) and Kasper Sandstrøm (drums), the Nottingham-formed band are carving out a unique space in the music scene with their genre-absent music. “We make guitar music – that’s probably the main instrument that centres everything,” shares Cohen-Towell. “I’d say we’re quite genre-less, though,” they add swiftly. And while the “genre-agnostic” label is doing the rounds among rising indie groups, with Divorce, it’s actually true. Since forming in 2021, the band has moved fluidly between sounds, drawing from folk, indie, country, punk, and rock while never settling too neatly into any one space. Growing out of long-standing creative friendships, starting when they were “roughly 16,” and shaped by years thereafter of playing, experimenting, and figuring out what feels right, their music, like their banter, feels at once spontaneous and deeply connected.

With two EPs behind them and a forthcoming debut album and tour, the group seem to be finding their rhythm, rather than categorisation. Drive to Goldenhammer is the product of that momentum – a body of work that, despite the band’s restless creativity, feels more cohesive than anything they’ve written before. A product of lives moving in tandem, the album couldn’t have been written at any other time. “It all very much exists in the same year of songwriting,” Cohen-Towell explains. “Felix and I have been writing together for a long time. Quite naturally, the things that we write about tend to align – we have quite similar lives. For the debut album of Divorce, we wanted it to be as aligned as possible.”

This was helped by label support and time – sitting as a band rather than writing between day jobs and evening gigs, as before. From that comes a clarity to their songwriting, a legibility formed from having space to reflect on life in flux and then articulate it into something from the ground up. In that way, Drive to Goldenhammer feels less like a mission statement and more like a memo – one that captures Divorce exactly as they are: right here and now.

So if Drive to Goldenhammer captures Divorce in a moment, it’s a moment that feels untethered – caught between movement and stillness, searching for something solid. That feeling of transience became a defining theme of the album, surfacing naturally as the band wrote. “A big feeling that we had through the writing process was spacelessness and also of finding home while moving around a lot,” Cohen-Towell explains. That search for belonging, for stability in shift, runs through the record. “Trying to piece together a personal life on top of all of that is really hard, and quite a few of the songs came from that,” shares Mackenzie-Barrow, capturing the tension that feels intrinsic to both Divorce the Band and Divorce the People. Their music is everywhere at once and yet still carves out a place of its own, while they themselves tell me about how it’s rooted in the Midlands.

“We’re just” – Peter Smith begins, searching for a better word before settling on here. “And there’s loads of people here, but sometimes it feels like we’re overlooked. Growing up it felt like there was a constant push and pull in different directions of where to go,” he finishes. “And then there’s the cost of trying to get out and all the things you leave behind,” Mackenzie-Barrow adds as Cohen-Towell picks up the thread: “Realising as well that you can’t just find a life elsewhere, like, it’s not just waiting and ready for you. That comes into the lyrics a lot and was just ruling our lives for the time this album was in development. That sense of home when we couldn’t go back to being still, back to our actual lives.”

This friction between escape and permanence lingers throughout Drive to Goldenhammer. Woven into its rich, evocative sound, there’s something pastoral in the way Divorce approaches songwriting. Perhaps it’s the Midlands of it all, or perhaps it’s the personal experience channelled into the music. You hear it in “Pill”, a charged track unpicking sexual discoveries, long-distance relationships, and being fully seen. With glitchy electronics, gruff guitar lines, and a delicate piano solo to keep you on your toes, its playful arrangement mirrors how emotions rarely move in straight lines.

Meanwhile, loss sits at the heart of “Old Broken String”, a slow, deliberate elegy that showcases the band’s skill in moving between styles, with its introspective lyrics and wistful melodies. Making an appearance here is the fiddle – rich and mournful. Collaborator Chris Haigh weaves through and over the crooning harmonies of the band’s deft co-leads, reminding you that whatever genre they pull from, Divorce’s music is grounded and lived-in.

As they look to the future, the band shares excitement for what’s to come. Other than the pasta bake, it’s the album, it’s in-stores come early March, then it’s a “big, massive” UK/EU tour – it’s sharing their music with a wider audience and experiencing new places for themselves. “We’re visiting absolutely loads of new places. We’re in Europe for a whole month and we’re playing really far away from the UK, which is really, really exciting,” says Mackenzie-Barrow.

Chatting with the band is easy and full of levity. Amid discussions of their emotional journeys and the raw honesty of their songwriting, it is this blend of earnestness and mischief, of profound introspection and playful banter, that makes this indie-outfit’s music so relatable and resonant. Unapologetically themselves, Divorce are not self-mythologising but honest, welcoming in a celebration of the human condition in all its messy, beautiful complexity.