New York garage rock band St. Divine has built a reputation on punk Americana with dark romance at its core, and “The Devil That You Know,” released June 5th as the title track of their forthcoming debut album, is the clearest statement of that identity yet. The song premiered on WMFO 91.5 in Boston on May 30th and was featured on the Gary Dranow show, racking up over 100,000 views. Written by Judy Ann Nock, the song is a veiled reference to the loss of her husband David to suicide nearly five years ago – he had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, including auditory hallucinations, and Nock has said she wanted the song’s chaos of voices to approximate what that might have felt like for him. The chorus carries the weight of survivor’s guilt directly, and it’s a credit to the band that they let the song sit in that difficulty rather than soften it.
Musically, old spaghetti westerns are invoked with the big guitar sound played through rotary speakers, sounding like it’s echoing through the Grand Canyon. It sets the atmosphere with that captivating bassline so the duet can tell their story of love and anguish. In a way, love and anguish are a duet of their own, how inseparable they are – always tied to one another like sworn lovers, one never fully present without the other lurking close behind. That tension plays out in the arrangement itself: the hypnotic, wailing guitars and the frantic collision of voices in the middle eight aren’t decoration, they’re the unraveling the lyric is describing, rendered in sound rather than just told in words.
St. Divine has made a habit of transforming hard subject matter into something cathartic rather than simply heavy, and “The Devil That You Know” continues that. The dual harmonies the band is known for do real work here, carrying both the tenderness and the chaos without losing either. With the full album arriving June 12th and a release party at Mama Tried on July 2nd, this title track sets a serious tone for what’s coming.
