“No Havana” was shaped by tragedy as much as politics.
“I was watching my dad’s health deteriorating as it became clear the political tides were rolling back to the 1950s,” says Devlin And The Harm frontman Devlin McCluskey. “He lived through the Battle Of Britain, spent years in Spain and France, immigrated to the U.S. and became a union organizer. He’d traveled the world, and we often talked about going to Cuba. But as a resident alien with kidney failure, he was fearful of repercussions. In his last days, he had to watch the world rejecting the progress he’d been working toward throughout his life.”
Devlin is the former singer/guitarist for acclaimed Los Angeles indie rockers the Dead Ships, whose underground cred peaked when they were picked to perform at Coachella in 2016 as an unsigned band. Since the group’s quiet dissolution in 2022, McCluskey has endured a few tough miles on the road to his latest transformation. While recording the Harm’s upcoming self-titled debut, drummer Michael Nussbaum broke his back paragliding. Then McCluskey’s father suffered kidney failure and was put on dialysis.
In the studio, things were going comparatively well with Grammy-nominated producer Alex Newport (At The Drive-In, Death Cab For Cutie) at the helm. Out of pure luck, Nussbaum had finished his drum parts before the accident, and Newport had plenty of tricks up his sleeve, laying down a grand-scale bed of sound for the band’s effortless assimilation of ’70s rock, garage soul and symphonic indie pop. But just as they were finishing the album, McCluskey’s dad took a turn for the worse.
“I was back home in Illinois taking him to dialysis, watching the 2024 election shift, feeling like there was no stopping the horror around the corner,” says McCluskey. “A lot of the songs I write try to make sense of larger cultural shifts and tragedies through the personal struggles that define those times for me.”
Recorded a month before his father passed, “No Havana” was McCluskey’s way of projecting his overwhelming sense of loss onto a wider screen.
“Now the horror is here on a personal and societal level, but you still need to find a way to get through,” says McCluskey. “And one of the only things that makes me feel good is hearing my dad’s voice in my head all day.”
We’re proud to premiere Devlin And The Harm’s “No Havana.” Look for the band’s self-released LP on May 22.
—Hobart Rowland
