Divorce Interview

You have been playing together since 2008.  Why is the debut album coming just now?

    No deliberate reason, it's just the way things have worked out, but we're glad it didn't happen until now as we couldn't have made the kind of album that we did until recently. All the singles we've done over the past few years have been great training for us to take on the challenge of making the kind of full-length we wanted to.
    Also, Michael who runs Night School Records asked if we'd like to release an album with him, something that no other label we worked with before had offered to do. We lucked out too as we couldn't have asked for a better label to work with.

I was surprised to hear that the debut album was all music written within the past year or so.  Why did you opt to not put any of your other music on it?

    Everything we'd written prior to the songs for the album had already been released and we didn't want to re-record anything that had already come out just to make up the numbers. The one exception was our song 'Stabby Stab' because we wanted to elaborate on the original by adding some free-jazz saxophone and giving it a bit of a fresh dimension.
    We also wanted to make the album a reflection of where the band is right now and for it to work best as a complete piece of work rather than some kind of retrospective of previously heard odds and ends that have no relation to each other. Because the music was all written and recorded within a year it feels to us more unified and direct.

Were you all friends before starting Divorce, or did any of you end up joining through a wanted ad or something strange?

    Some of us were friends previous to the band starting and some of us met at houseparties or through mutual friends. Thankfully we never had to place any musician wanted ads anywhere, we're a bit of a hard band to advertise for and besides, only egomanics who think they're the latest hot-shit virtuoso tend to answer wanted ads. Life's too short to deal with a parade of musical masturbators, starting bands with friends is the only way to go.

Why is VSO only referred to by that acronym?  What does it stand for, and what do you call him?

    VSO is called VSO purely to confuse everybody.

You recently played a show with Doomsday Student, how was that?

    Fantastic! We're all big fans of their previous band Arab On Radar so it was a pretty big deal for us that we got to share a bill with them. Their set was absolutely ferocious, plus they were true gentlemen. Excellent t-shirt designs too.

What were your favorite albums of 2012 (if you have a chart/top 10 list/ each have only a few favorites, whichever)?

    Some records that have really stood out this year were Normal Love's "Survival Tricks", their first album in about 5 years, "Damning With Faint Praise" by Yowie, their first album in about EIGHT years. Also the EP by No Babies, debut albums by Staer from Norway, Holy Mountain from Glasgow and Blacklisters from Leeds in the UK. The new Extra Life album is fantastic as well.

What's the practice space like right now, and do you record in your own studio or have to pay to record?

    We recently moved to a new place and it's working out pretty sweet so far, biggest reason being that it's not far from our respective flats and we're all lazy. None of us have the expertise to properly record ourselves, our album and last few singles were recorded with our friend Ali Walker, who has done a brilliant job for everything he's recorded for us and we hope to work more with him in the future too.

What are your plans for 2013, and if it is another album, are you planning on having a stateside label as well?

    It would be great to do another album within the next year, but we'll have to write it first! We've got around four new tracks in various stages of completion, lots of ideas are getting thrown around just now so it's very exciting and creative. As far as having an American label, Night School Records, our label here, gets distributed by Revolver in the states so we don't have much call to go searching for one.

What is one album I should hear that would be unknown outside of Europe?

    It's not a specific album, but our Glasgow friends Ultimate Thrush have been making some of the best noise-based music we've heard for a long time. We've toured with them a few times, released a split tape with them back in 2009 and always really enjoy sharing a stage with them. Their music (and loads of other Glasgow-based underground/DIY/noise stuff) can be heard and downloaded for free from the Winning sperm Party label Here.

That AIDS of Space music video was very nice, do you plan on having Sofia do any future work with you?

    We were extremely lucky to have had Sofia work on a video for us as she's not a music-video-maker in the literal sense, she creates astonishing visual art and works with video as well as other mediums. We're huge fans of the work she's created and we're just amazed at the job she did for our song, it's absolutely insane!

Who made the album art?

    Our guitarist Vickie and vocalist Jennie worked on it together. Both have done the artwork for different releases in the past and collaborated this time round. We also hand-screenprinted all 1000 of the vinyl covers too, so it was a real in-house creative job, lots of blood, sweat, tears and more blood.