In Case You Missed It (Oct. 2025): "Drive to Goldenhammer"

I love an indie record that can’t behave. I’m not referencing the derivative, "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2" knockoff, overblown British-punk way - but the kind whose style stops for a visit to many subgenres, yet somehow holds every track under the same thematic umbrella musically and topically.

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Divorce’s fresh release "Drive to Goldenhammer" isn’t overly easy, but not because it screams at you for 40 minutes and expects you to be grateful for the burst eardrum: The 2025 release from Nottingham-based four-piece is the most edgy album you’ll ever want to play on a sunny spring afternoon. This is a band that clearly loves music - and not just the idea of making it and collecting “cool-cred” (although maybe being in a band is only “awesome, dude” until the very last second before turning 30). Their sound is brimming with cross-genre curiosity: alt-country and pastoral rock influence the opener “Antarctica”, a slightly ambient take on the British countryside with a distinct Elephant-6 Collective whimsical glaze, while “Parachute” experiments with twee, flowery arrangements that wrap around unironed harmonies between the two lead singers.

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Still, the album doesn’t lean too much into its folkish instincts to lose its sparkle: “Jet Show” - one of the more fraught, higher-energy tracks - unreels like jangle pop just went electric, featuring one of the album’s most gripping vocal performances. The harmonies drive themselves to the edge of a meltdown: they’re taut and frayed, yet never quite allow themselves to collapse under their own weight. “All My Freaks” channels the pingy pulse of 2010s indie, combining light electronic flickers springing above a wall of industrialist guitar. It’s regrettably not a cheeky LCD Soundsystem nod, but it still could have easily lived in that era’s niche of painfully self-aware indie rock. “Pill”, another of the album’s stronger fixtures, spins into feverish, off-kilter territory with pulsing drums, ribbon-like guitar and harp riff-offs, and vocals that slither in and out of oscillating sequences. On paper, it should sound like everyone’s fighting for dominance; in practice, it feels like they’re locked in the same complicated emotion, each adding their own shade to its nuance.

Lyrically, "Drive to Goldenhammer" navigates the pull between sustaining love and the freedom that comes from cutting ties - like if U2’s “With or Without You” were reimagined as a concept album in emotional 4D. 

Opener “Antarctica” captures the tug-of-war:

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“It comes and goes / Like someone pulling on a rope that gets / A little longer each time I get free / I was made to love you / But the living made me weak.”

Meanwhile, “Parachute” vows:

“Takes a lot to make a person / Half as strong as you deserve them / I will try to be that person / Every day I am alive.”

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By the closer “Mercy”, the band decelerates from the steam gathered in the back half, returning to a harmonic indie-folk touchpoint as though the more angst-filled moments and themes filling the album didn’t even matter. “I think it has a feeling of the Simon and Garfunkel album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. The final track, ‘Song for the Asking,’ is just so gorgeous and simple. It’s really sad and feels far away, like you’re listening to it from a hundred miles away. I love the way ‘Mercy’ is produced because it gives me the same sensation”, said lead singer Tiger in a conversation with Overblown UK. And it’s true - there’s a certain calm-after-the-storm feeling in the final track, declaring - after a self-inflicted impetus in the middle of the record:

“There’s blood on the wall/I will help you clean it all” and finalizing with “I’ll always love you for that/I’ll always love you like that."

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There’s an uncontrived maturity here that lies within the contours of its own initial airiness. The record possesses a sense of nuance to it that comes only with age and experience, unlike some younger acts that intentionally leverage the bipolar extremism of being young, brash, and a self-proclaimed Enneagram Type 4.

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Divorce proves that emotional clarity doesn’t water down punch or dilute artistic purpose; it might just sharpen it.