Loaded Album of the week
By Fred Spanner
The Divine Comedy: Rainy Sunday Afternoon ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Neil Hannon returns, umbrella in hand, for The Divine Comedy’s thirteenth album. It’s a record that drips with elegiac beauty and wit, soaked through with reflection. This isn’t just an album for soggy Sunday afternoons; it’s the soundtrack for them, for remembering, for longing, and for airing out your melancholy in grand orchestral style.
If Office Politics was sharp, clever, socially attuned, Rainy Sunday Afternoon is its more intimate, heavier-hearted sibling. It doesn’t have the same satirical bite, but what it lacks in cheek it makes up for in vulnerability and musical artistry.
For longtime fans, this is another chapter of the Hannon we know and love, and perhaps his most emotionally resonant yet. For new listeners, it’s a sumptuous entry point into what orchestral pop can achieve when made with weight, wisdom and a real sense of loss as well as love.
It’s drenched in emotion, rich in architecture, occasionally indulgent, but undeniably moving.