DEMOB HAPPY
HEADLINE UK TOUR // SEPTEMBER 2023
DIVINE MACHINES LP // OUT NOW
“I always love a musical slap in the face, this is pretty much in that bag …” CLARA AMFO, BBC RADIO 1
“The Newcastle via Brighton trio amplify their ambitions, matching their DIY roots to a palpable thirst for connection …” CLASH
“Guitars judder and crash like Royal Blood against a dreamy backdrop of Beatles-esque psychedelia, with disco-ripe synths …” CLASSIC ROCK
Newcastle via Brighton trio DEMOB HAPPY embark on their headline UK and EU tour this autumn following the release of their third album, DIVINE MACHINES, via Liberator Music. STREAM HERE
UK dates as follows:
SEPTEMBER
Wed 06 BRISTOL Thekla
Thu 07 BIRMINGHAM Mama Roux
Fri 08 LEEDS Key Club
Sat 09 MANCHESTER Yes (Pink Room)
Sun 10 GLASGOW Audio
Tue 12 NEWCASTLE Cluny
Wed 13 NOTTINGHAM Bodega
Thu 14 LONDON Village Underground
Fri 15 BRIGHTON Chalk
Stepping into a new area for the band, Divine Machines has seen Demob Happy conquer worlds previously uncharted. In January the trio unleashed the raucous first single, Voodoo Science, earning the covers of The Rock List and New Noise on Spotify and racking up several plays on BBC Radio 1 from Clara Amfo and Jack Saunders, with the latter stating, “It’s like Daft Punk got abandoned in the desert and were found by Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age”. Voodoo Science saw further support from Rolling Stone, DIY, Clash, Dork, Upset and Notion. Louder Sound heralded the single as their Track of The Week and similarly supported the doomsday follow up single Run Baby Run, which additionally earned Demob Happy their first BBC 6 Music plays.
Since forming more than a decade ago in their hometown of Newcastle, Demob Happy have earned increasingly exciting career milestones through a combination of hard graft and gritty determination that would KO most bands. They’ve gigged incessantly, building on the acclaim surrounding their 2015 debut album Dream Soda, with the NME stating, “the band balance heaviness with hooks, antagonism and hedonism”, and the 2018 follow up Holy Doom which DIY proclaimed as, “an absolute stormer”. Their albums and singles have seen the band amass approaching 50 million collective streams.
They’ve toured the USA four times, gigged with Jack White, Band Of Skulls, Royal Blood and The Amazons, with Jack White also inviting the band on stage to jam together, played the main stage at Leeds and Reading festivals, headlined London’s iconic Scala, and received critical acclaim from The Guardian, The Independent, DIY, Kerrang, Dork and many more. In between all this, they’ve continued to meticulously hone the inner workings of their practice, with vocalist Matthew fine-tuning his production skills to the point where they can now take everything in-house.
Aesthetically embracing a Blade Runner-esque sci-fi leaning, lyrically Divine Machines finds the band swerving from the political corruption and modern world dystopia that they’ve previously detailed, to yearn for something more hopeful that starts from within.
“I see what’s happening to the human race as a moment in a hero’s journey,” says Matthew. “We’re at the point in the James Bond film where the villains reveal themselves and tell us the plan. We’ve got Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, these absolute supervillains with their rockets doing whatever the hell they want, and Bill Gates buying vast swathes of farmland for who knows what. They’re all revealing their plans to humanity and we’re all still going, ‘I hope they’re the good guys’.”
The album as a whole is a record that Demob Happy had to build towards. It’s the product not just of a strange extended period of work – both on the album and on themselves – but of an entire career spent putting in the hours, believing tirelessly in what they’re doing and, slowly but surely, watching the world start to believe in it too. “We’ve never chased the dragon of success,” affirms Matthew, “even though we’ve been encouraged to, but we’re not interested in doing it like that. We’ve always done what we wanted but now it seems like it might align with what other people want as well.”
DIVINE MACHINES TRACK LISTING:
- Token Appreciation Society
- Voodoo Science
- Earth Mover
- Tear It Down
- Muscular Reflex
- Super-Fluid
- She’s As Happy As A Man Can Be
- Run Baby Run
- I Have A Problem (I Ignore)
- Divine Machines
- Hades, Baby
Matthew Marcantonio – vocals and bass | Adam Godfrey – guitar | Tom Armstrong – drums
RUN BABY RUN video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOXHORGBAJo
TOKEN APPRECIATION SOCIETY video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4NSJ0Xqk5I
VOODOO SCIENCE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOe9L0V8pz0
WEBSITE | SPOTIFY | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER
From OK Computer to Screamadelica, history has shown that a band’s third album is when shit starts to get real. When, after an introductory debut and a second that tests new waters, the particular alchemy of a group stamps its personality in ways that no other configuration of individuals can do; when the outside voices have been tempered and all that’s left is a perfect cocktail of confidence, skill and momentum. It’s a theory that’s been proven time and time again, and one that Newcastle trio Demob Happy are underlining with Divine Machines, a third album that harnesses their delicate tightrope of heaviness and melody, sweetness and riffs, and rides it up to the stratosphere.
“You need almost insane levels of resilience and belief to be an artist, but we’ve gone out and put in the work over the years,” begins drummer Tom Armstrong, as frontman and bassist Matthew Marcantonio affirms: “This isn’t music for pubs or bars anymore, they’re grand songs for grand venues. It’s backwards engineering.”
Indeed, since forming more than a decade ago back in hometown Newcastle, Demob Happy have earned every increasingly exciting career milestone through a combination of hard graft and gritty determination that would KO most bands. They’ve gigged incessantly, building on the slowly escalating interest from 2015 debut Dream Soda and 2018’s Holy Doom, and transforming it into a second album campaign that saw them tour the USA four times alongside a UK support tour with Jack White and an EU stint with Royal Blood. In between all that, they’ve continued to meticulously hone the inner workings of their practice, with Matthew fine tuning his production skills to the point where they can take everything in-house.
Having played the Reading and Leeds Festival main stage and joined Jack White on stage for an impromptu collaboration, it had all steered Demob Happy to the start of 2020, when work for LP3 would begin in Wales following the busiest, most objectively successful period of their careers to date. “The plan was to go and write, get some real quality demos, spruce them up in the studio in May and release the album in August 2020,” explains guitarist Adam Godfrey. The world, of course, had other ideas in mind. However, rather than merely postponing the record, the vast expanse of time afforded to the band would become the making of Divine Machines – an album whose intricacies and experiments come as the result of hours upon hours of a lockdown labour of love.
“To keep myself busy and sane I started reworking what we demoed in Wales. The world was in chaos and I didn’t know where it would take me or what I was even making at first, but from having so much time and going a bit nuts, they became incredible and way more advanced than demos we’d ever made before,” Matthew explains.
“There are always these flashes and moments of magic that are sacrificed between the demos and the album, but the extra time I had meant nothing was lost, and they became the foundation of the album. This is why The Beatles were The Beatles because they were four lads having a laugh, but they were inside Abbey Road – the most sophisticated studio in the world. That cocktail of having fun and taking the piss and having it captured expertly: that’s where there’s absolute magic.”
From the opening bars of Token Appreciation Society, bars that rev into gear on synthetic wobbles before finding their groove in a 70s sci-fi bass stomp flecked with falsetto backing vocal harmonies, Divine Machines feels like the album Demob Happy have always been destined to make. The cornerstone influences – a sprinkle of Queens of the Stone Age swagger; a splash of glam rock; a Lennon-like knack for melody – remain present, but utilised in ways that rely wholly on Matthew, Adam and Tom’s specific magic as a unit: one that values a “janky guitar solo” as much as it does a beautifully-crafted, unexpected love song.
Though, aesthetically, Divine Machines embraces a Bladerunner-esque sci-fi leaning, lyrically it finds the band swerving from the political corruption and modern world dystopias that they’ve previously detailed and yearning for something more hopeful, that starts from within.
“I really see what’s happening to the human race as a moment in a hero’s journey. We’re at the point in the James Bond film where the villains reveal themselves and tell us the plan. We’ve got Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, these absolute supervillains with their rockets doing whatever they want, and software guru Bill Gates buying vast swathes of farmland for who knows what. They’re all revealing their plans to humanity and we’re all still going, ‘I hope they’re the good guys!’” begins the vocalist.
“What we need is inspiration to change because we only win this war if the change starts with us. There’s huge ripples of that in society, and it’s distorted through social media, but you can see people becoming more self-aware. That’s what I wanted to write about – inspiring that change.”
These grand clarion calls for empathy form the true heart of the band’s latest album. From the gargantuan, rumbling slow build of Earth Mover – “a rallying cry for the human race to get up off its knees” – to the fizzing, irrepressible rock behemoth of Voodoo Science that reclaims the term from dogmatic Western understanding, it’s an album that truly believes in the power of people. The almost AC/DC-ish Tear It Down is about “ripping down the lies that society has told us and reprogramming ourselves to not see things in this binary way”, while closing track Hades Baby –
recorded with an orchestra at the actual Abbey Road (in Studio Two, no less) – glimmers with both widescreen ambition and a delicious slap of irony. “Ironically, it’s a big two fingers to billionaires, and we played it for an Amazon session. Bezos paid for that,” Adam chuckles.
Elsewhere, Divine Machines features some of the most emotionally soft songs the trio have penned to date. Multi-part harmonies cocoon the gnarly riff of Muscular Reflex – “a beautiful, earnest love song to yourself and to the world” – while She’s As Happy As A Man Can Be, states Matthew, is a song that’s taken him years to arrive at.
“It took a long time for me to shake off what I felt was this Northern idea that it has to be hard, it has to have an edge all the time,” he says. “I’m still dealing with this childhood conflict of being tender and emotional and being made to feel small and soft for being that way. I buried that side away in my songwriting and it took a long time to be vulnerable enough to write a ballad like She’s As Happy As A Man Can Be.”
Divine Machines as a whole is a record that Demob Happy had to build towards. It’s the product not just of a strange extended period of work – both on the album and on themselves – but of an entire career spent putting in the hours, believing tirelessly in what they’re doing and, slowly but surely, watching the world start to believe in it too. As Matthew affirms: “We’ve never chased the dragon of success, even though we’ve been encouraged to, but we’re not interested in doing it like that. We’ve always done what we wanted, but now it seems like it might align with what other people want as well.”