REVIEW | "Drive to Goldenhammer" by Divorce
- Caitlin Taff
- Mar 18
- 2 min read
“We got to make an album the way we wanted to, kept the weird parts in, followed the warmth and didn’t overthink it,” Tiger Cohen-Towell says of ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’. And it’s true: the warmth and the weirdness they speak of is palpable throughout the entire album.
Opening track ‘Antarctica’, in all its folk-y, harmonica twang, is abundant in both. It welcomes the listener in like a car window rolled down for the summer breeze, road stretched out far ahead, homeward bound. It makes it clear that ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ is, really, about the drive rather than the destination. Having sorely missed out on Divorce’s music until this album, I was instantly taken by how charmingly spontaneous every turn felt. I had no clue what to expect around any next corner, and thus had the most enjoyable listening experience I’ve had in quite some time.
Next comes ‘Lord’, a vastly different feel, all indie-rock guitar riffs, which has co-vocalists Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow singing, “I’m a seahorse / and I need a little sugar.” The sublimely bizarre nature of Divorce’s lyricism makes every line an unpredictable little joy.
It’s the sweep of genres as much as it is the lyrics. If ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ is all about the drive, then the songs are too. Rather than a box to tick next to ‘rock and roll cymbals’ or catchy chorus’ (though, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of both to be found on the album), Divorce follow their hearts to tell the stories they want to tell. As Cohen-Towell said, they don’t overthink it. This is so tangibly prevalent in ‘Hangman’, a song written by Mackenzie-Barrow about the “hardest and most rewarding” job he’s ever done as a social worker. In writing this track, he ended up using his fellow bandmate’s Omnichord, claiming “its rigidity and harmonic restrictions helped in some way to unlock [his] subconscious mind and force [him] not to overthink things.” It was clearly the instrument that the song demanded, and that gut instinct paid off in spades, because what a song it is.
If there was any doubt that ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ could be a strong contender for album of the year – which, let’s be real, there wasn’t – ‘Jet Show’ is the song that truly solidifies it. Touring the UK and Europe from the end of March, right on through to festival season at Get Together and All Points East, it’s a guarantee that Divorce will blow some roofs – or, you know, skies – off with this gloriously shout-able anthem.
‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ isn’t just a promising debut, but a defining touchstone. In warmth and weirdness, Divorce write songs that reach out for a connection in the most peculiar and human way possible, and though it’s delightfully impossible to predict where their sprawling imaginations might take them next, it’s definitely somewhere big.
