A Boston-formed, Brooklyn-based quintet, Divine Sweater came to the attention of many back in 2021, appearing on two high-profile compilation albums with two very different cover versions, Radiohead’s Creep and Noah Greenbaum’s Spirit In The Sky, which they shared alongside their excellent second album, Divine Sweater Presents: The Ten Year Plan. Now signed to Better Company Records, the label run by San Fermin’s Ellis Ludwig-Leone and Allen Tate, the band recently announced their new album, Down Deep (A Nautical Apocalypse), which will see the light of day at the end of May. Ahead of the release, today they’re premiering the latest single from it, In The Comedown.

Written in rural Maine, before being recorded with Allen Tate, In The Comedown is a song about, “communal transcendence, the calming power of the water, and the challenge of staying fully present in any given moment”. The band recall how it was inspired by an evening boat ride, “we were drifting in the middle of a lake during a June sunset and it looked like dusk was showing every color in the visible light spectrum“. As well as the influence of awe-inspiring nature, the track is also indebted to something more human, with the lyrics inspired by pantoum, “a poetic form that repeats and recycles lines to continuously create new meaning out of familiar phrases“.

Musically the track is a luxurious slice of orchestral indie-pop, vocalist Meghan Kelleher’s crystalline near-soprano accompanied by prominent guitars, and flourishes of strings, horns and glockenspiel, reminiscent of acts like Natalie Prass or The New Pornographers. The track is a perfect introduction to the newly conceptual quality in Divine Sweater’s songwriting, forming one of a series of, “vignettes from the end of the world”. Here in the album’s story, we find the band throwing back to life before the world became uninhabitable, looking back on the good times with a mixture of regret and revelation. Down Deep (A Nautical Apocalypse) is fiction, yet it is fiction on the edge of fact, a future that feels all too close to reality, a perfect soundtrack for the end of the world, that we can only hope we’ll never need.

Down Deep (A Nautical Apocalypse) is out May 26th via Better Company Records. For more information on Divine Sweater visit https://divinesweater.com/.