Listen to the song that made Divine Sweater go viral on TikTok

This is an exclusive song premiere, part of WBUR's effort to highlight New England musicians.

It was November of 2022, two nights before Divine Sweater was supposed to go into the studio to record an album, when Sean Seaver was struck by an idea. He was playing around with a drum machine called an OP-1 — a little handheld synthesizer about the size of a keyboard — and came up with a short drum pattern. It was a peppy, syncopated beat — nothing fancy. But it unlocked something for Seaver.

“It was the rare song that just came out all at once,” Seaver recalled. He thought the beat had a hypnotic quality, so he extended that feeling by using the same six-chord progression for the verses and the chorus. Even before he’d written the lyrics, he knew he wanted the song to be about infatuation, the kind of all-consuming fixation that loops through your head like a song on repeat.

“I just wanted something transportive, because I felt like the song was going to end up lyrically about what it did end up being about,” Seaver said. “So I was trying to mimic that feeling.”

He stayed up all night writing. The result was “Deep Side,” a bop that’s as addictive and ephemeral as a crush. “I am a million different particles under your control,” frontwoman Meghan Kelleher sings over an ebullient bassline, each syllable landing percussively like a drum machine of her own.

“When I woke up and heard it for the first time, I immediately was like, we need to record this song in the studio,” said Kelleher, who is also Seaver’s partner.

That’s exactly what they did. “Deep Side” seemed to be charmed from the start. A video Kelleher captured while they were recording the song went viral on TikTok, amassing over 2 million views. In it, the band’s drummer, Chris Southiere, gets so caught up in dancing along to the drum machine track that he almost misses his cue. Grabbing his drumsticks in a panic, he manages to execute his entrance perfectly. “Still didn’t miss a beat,” remarked one commenter — none other than the actor Kevin Bacon.

It’s a silly, candid moment that captures Divine Sweater’s we’re-just-a-bunch-of-best-friends ethos. “I think every time that it's the five of us together, we're usually giggling so much that something could go off the rails at truly any moment,” Seaver said.

The band’s five members, who also include Alex Goldberg on bass and Steve Lin on keys, are genuinely tight. (Kelleher and Seaver met at Boston College, while some friendships in the band go back to high school.) Even the name of the band — a reference to a lucky sweater Seaver inherited from his great-uncle who was a Dominican friar — has become a kind of inside joke. “It kind of has a ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ quality amongst our band,” Seaver said. Whenever someone wears the sweater onstage, Divine Sweater seems to have an especially good show.

“I feel like our music is very playful and collaborative,” Kelleher said. The band’s silliness, she added, comes out in its music videos. For the “Deep Side” video, they all dressed up as vampires, in capes and fake teeth, and sucked the life from their poor, unsuspecting (human) bassist — a pulpy riff on the idea of a crush as all-consuming.

Now, at long last, Divine Sweater is ready to release “Deep Side” as it prepares to take the stage at Boston Calling at the end of May.

“Our next goal,” Kelleher said, “is, how do we get Kevin Bacon to listen to it?”