To mark the start of their UK and EU headline tour, Newcastle via Brighton trio DEMOB HAPPY have shared a brand new single SWEET & SOUR AMERICA, out now via Liberator Music. Despite the band’s new album Divine Machines only just being released, Sweet & Sour America is a previously unheard anthem, adding to the band’s ever-growing, riff-driven repertoire. The single is available now and is accompanied by a Soslow-produced video.
Speaking about the meaning behind the single, Demob Happy frontman Matthew Marcantonio says, “America is a beautiful place, but we’ve seen both sides on the tours we’ve done there, the highs and the lows, and it never fails to strike a chord. This is our ode to the strange dichotomy of America.”
Praised for their highly energetic and impeccable live show, the band embark on their extensive UK and EU headline tour from this week, after which they will head to the US for a run of shows with Death From Above 1979.
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
With the release of their new album Divine Machines (listen here) Demob Happy stepped into a new era, seeing them 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 well over 45 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.
History has shown that a band’s third album is when it really starts to get real – their particular alchemy stamps its personality in ways that no other configuration of individuals can; 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 has been proven time and time again and one that Demob Happy have underlined with Divine Machines; one that harnesses their delicate tightrope of heaviness and melody, sweetness and riffs, and rides it up to the stratosphere.
