After an incredible festival season including stop-offs at Manchester Psych Festival and Truck Festival in Oxfordshire, Divorce are back on the road. Since the release of their debut EP Get Mean in December 2022, the Nottingham-based four-piece have been making a name for themselves with a fresh perspective on alternative music which is fuelled by country, indie-folk and grunge influences. Performing all twelve tracks of their stellar debut album Drive to Goldenhammer at Manchester’s Gorilla, the band displayed their own dexterity and charmed a packed-out crowd.
Irish-Californian duo DUG were chosen as support for Divorce’s tour, and while they certainly possessed the charisma and humour to captivate a crowd, their transatlantic blend of traditional Irish and American folk failed to impress. The audience seemed happy to watch the set, however, and scrambled to catch a free DUG-branded t-shirt that was thrown into the crowd. Jonny Pickett, the Californian half of the duo, then remarked upon the distinction between Manchester’s reaction and that of a previous audience, stating “there’s no worse feeling than throwing a t-shirt into a silent crowd” and receiving plenty of laughs in return.
Beginning their own set with ‘Fever Pitch’, Divorce similarly sounded off-kilter, and not in their typically unconventional alt-country style. Nevertheless, the song’s end was greeted with cheers by the packed-out audience, and the transition to ‘All My Freaks’ saw the band back on track. As the first offering from their debut album, the vibrant, synth-laden song allowed Divorce to launch their fans into the world of Drive to Goldenhammer, and it functioned in the same way live.
‘Gears’ is a track tinged by Americana, and allowed the perfect opportunity for the band’s leading duo Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow to exhibit the flawless interplay of their powerful vocals, with Cohen-Towell’s being bold and declarative while Mackenzie-Barrow’s provide a grounded and almost brooding contrast. The song was followed by a barrage of album tracks: the soft-toned yet hauntingly building ‘Karen’, propulsively volatile ‘Jet Show’ and subtly devastating ‘Parachuter’ all made an appearance, preceding Drive to Goldenhammer opener ‘Antarctica’.
Plucking a highlight from their (admittedly quite small) back catalogue, Divorce performed ‘Sex & the Millennium Bridge’, before returning to Goldenhammer once again. ‘Pill’ begins in typical Divorce fashion with discordant guitar and lo-fi drums before transforming into a ballad as Cohen-Towell and Mackenzie-Barrow deliver heart-shattering lines such as “honestly, I put too much weight on you, and you’re cracking underneath” that are enough to bring a tear to anyone’s eye.
‘Scratch Your Metal’ saw the band once again showcasing their ability to craft evolving soundscapes: the song began in a state of calm hypnosis, before Cohen-Towell’s vocals and instrumentation courtesy of Adam Smith and Kasper Sandstrøm increased in intensity. ‘Where Do You Go’ demonstrates similar qualities, while ‘Old Broken String’ offers a more mellow approach, drawing comparisons to the tenderly contemplative songs of Laura Marling’s early career, or even Big Thief‘s softer cuts. Lines such as “I’ll come looking for you one day, with my sorry eyes and my beard gone grey” were delivered with the same passion they display on record, providing yet another example of the band’s exceptional lyrical aptitude.
Divorce’s performance was delivered to a consistently engaged audience, leading the band to repeatedly express their gratitude. For ‘Eat My Words’, Mackenzie-Barrow invited an audience member on-stage to sing alongside the band: “we’ve just got a request and we don’t normally get a request from the crowd, so we’re going to honour it… this is quite a novelty for us, everyone’s getting divorced tonight”. This made a surprisingly harmonious addition to the emotive delivery of the song’s vocals, as the visibly thrilled crowd member took his place between Cohen-Towell and Mackenzie-Barrow, creating a chorus with the duo and attempting to match their prowess with unpredictable amounts of success.
‘Lord’ and ‘Hangman’ closed the main portion of Divorce’s set: the latter was destined to be a live highlight with its instantly recognisable guitar riff and chant of “I care about you already, I wanna lift you up”. After departing the stage for a brief pre-encore break, Divorce returned to perform album closer ‘Mercy’ and ‘Checking Out’, a song which is unmistakably the band’s most popular. Accordingly, its performance was met by every member of the crowd reciprocating its lyrics in a recitation of love and admiration. “We couldn’t have wished for a better show”, Mackenzie-Barrow remarked before the band departed once more.
With music this impressive, dynamic and emotionally imbued, it’s obvious that Divorce deserve to be a household name. Their ascendancy is clearly underway already, as the jump from YES Basement just a year and a half ago to a packed-out Gorilla this time around exemplifies. The seventeen-song set made an hour and a quarter feel far too short, and testified to the mesmerising power of melancholia as well as the resilience that can arise in “a fictional refuge from the world at large” such as Goldenhammer.
