Newcastle via Brighton trio Demob Happy (Matthew Marcantonio – vocals and bass | Adam Godfrey – guitar | Tom Armstrong – drums) embark on their headline UK and EU tour in a few days time, following the release of their third album, ‘Divine Machines’, via Liberator Music – Stream HERE.
The September UK tour dates are:
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
Tour tickets can be purchased HERE.
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’ album tracklisting:
‘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’
