DIVIL Release Orangutan Ahead of Debut EP As Bassist Conor Cusack Faces Cancer Surgery

Dublin trio Divil have released their second single, Orangutan, taken from their debut EP DIVIL I, due on the 19th of June.

The band – Danny Dempsey McMahon on vocals, Jocelyn Vance on guitar and Conor Cusack on bass – have been building towards this release against a backdrop that goes well beyond music.

Divil was born out of loss. Vocalist Danny lost his father, and within weeks came the news that Conor had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer.

Faced with grief and fear arriving almost simultaneously, the three lifelong friends turned to music in a way they never had before, processing what they were going through in real time.

That story has since taken a new and urgent turn. Conor has been summoned to Belgium on next to no notice for emergency surgery – a pioneering procedure that could remove the majority of his cancer, and one that four years ago would not have been possible for his case.

The Irish music community, and many beyond it, have responded with an extraordinary outpouring of support, rallying behind a GoFundMe for Conor and his young family that raised over €100,000. DIVIL I was made while all of this was unfolding.

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If the debut single Thanks A Million was about being pulled out of a dark place by the people who love you, Orangutan is about what happens when you resist them. It is a song about escapism – about trying to feel better by doing all the wrong things. Divil describe it as the sound of a man alone in a house, pacing, fighting his own cravings, screaming into an iPad.

The track began with guitarist Jocelyn arriving early at the studio one afternoon, having spent a lot of time listening to Dean Martin. He had a loop pedal running, and something was starting to take shape.

“I was listening to a lot of Dean Martin samba music, and the chords for Orangutan grew out of that – it has that kind of rhythm to it,” Jocelyn explains. “I remember getting to practice early one day and having those chords playing on a loop pedal. I was noodling over them, cycling through different ideas for what sort of riff or voicing could go over that set of chords.”

“Danny came in and latched onto it straight away. He took out his iPad and recorded about a minute of me cycling through ideas. That minute eventually became the basis of the demo. We doubled it up and used it as the foundation for the song.”

“Danny took the recording home and waited. The right moment arrived on a weekend alone, under what he describes as a self-prescribed period of detention.

“I remember walking up the stairs to the studio and hearing some sinister sounding guitar pumping out of the room,” Danny recalls. “I was happy to find it was Jocelyn playing over a loop of himself. I just wanted to grab a snapshot of what he was doing and take it away, and go over it when I felt suitably manic to match the energy.” That manic energy arrived soon enough.

“Eventually the weekend came,” he continues. “I had the house to myself. At the time I was under a self-prescribed period of detention where I was not allowed to go out to let the hair down. I started looking through recent files, periodically getting up and nearly leaving the house, fighting the urge to bail on my disciplined evening of creativity.”

“I was delighted to find the loop I’d recorded a few days previous, and I just so happened to be feeling just as manic as the music. I spent the evening screaming into the iPad and pacing the house.”

The resulting lyrics draw on bad driving, frustration, and the very cravings he was trying to suppress. For Danny, writing it was its own form of release.

“The resulting lyrics reflect recent bad driving events, a lot of frustration, trying to strangle my own cravings into submission,” he says. “On reflection, it’s a snapshot of the fairly chaotic headspace I was in. I’m happy to say, as always, writing about it was the perfect catharsis and helped me slow down and come out of it. I’m glad to have a musical snapshot of that sped-up, manic feeling, but I’m glad I don’t feel like that now.”

When it came to recording, Divil made one decision that defines the track entirely – they kept the original iPad recording. Conor added bass. That was it.

Jocelyn picks up the story. “When we went to record the track, we actually used that original iPad recording because it had this great kind of immediacy to it that was impossible to replicate. Then Conor came in and did his thing with the bass, and that was basically it.”

The result is a track that sounds as though it was caught rather than made – raw, pacing, and full of the frantic energy that produced it. It is Divil at their most direct.

Orangutan is the second single from DIVIL I, which also includes debut single Thanks A Million and closing track Chewing Gum, a song about grief and the moments along the way that define you. These are songs written by three people who needed them as much as anyone who might listen to them.

DIVIL I is out on the 19th of June. Orangutan is out now.