Divorce make their return today with ‘O Calamity,’ their first new music since March’s acclaimed debut album, Drive to Goldenhammer. This new single follows a packed spring of sold-out UK shows, highlighted by their biggest headline performance at London’s KOKO, and extensive touring across Europe.
The band then embarked on a series of major US shows supporting Mumford & Sons, where the two groups notably collaborated both on and off stage. Divorce also made their debut at Glastonbury Festival, appearing on both the Greenpeace and BBC Introducing stages, and delivered a stripped-back rendition of their earlier single “Antarctica” for the BBC during the festival. With more touring planned across the UK, EU, and US before year-end—including support slots for Bombay Bicycle Club and The Maccabees—Divorce show no signs of slowing down in what’s already proven to be a breakthrough year.
Of the new single, co-vocalist and guitarist Tiger Cohen-Towell states,
O Calamity was written 6 years ago, I recall the vocals for the first verse and chorus came into my head during a shift at the bar I was working at, a pretty standard way that songwriting starts for me even still. Felix and I were performing under a different alias then, so we finished and arranged it together. We always thought it was a beautiful song and kept it in our pile of material, but didn’t include it on the album simply because of how long ago it had been written. This feels like a good time to stop hanging onto it, so here it is; a snapshot of our past written by the two of us, scarcely more than teenagers at the point of creation. It feels like an absolute world away, but good songs never get old.
