DEMOB HAPPY

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 chops to the point where they can take everything in-house.

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When something captures Matthew Iwanusa’s attention, he tends to dive in all the way — whether it’s the city he grew up in (New York), the basketball team he obsesses over (The Knicks), or the indelible images of his youth. The songwriter grew up in Brooklyn, but every summer his family would make the 10-hour drive to a getaway home on Lake Michigan. And for someone whose music has always felt a bit nostalgic, it only makes sense that a new project would be named in honor of the dunes that loomed over his childhood.

Music-making and New York living have always been the fabric of Iwanusa’s life. After a series of bands, things kicked into a new gear when he formed Caveman in 2010 with a few old friends. As evidenced by his work in Caveman, Iwanusa has always loved synths—but he wanted to move away from that as a driving force this time around.