David Miller doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve—he practically conducts a full-blown operatic aria with it. “This was the silliest thing we’ve ever done,” he says with a laugh, referring to the band’s first-ever self-written song on XX, Il Divo’s 20th anniversary album and first fully independent release. And then he proceeds to unpack, in meticulous and exhausting detail, just how silly and monumental it actually was.
To say Il Divo is reinventing itself would be inaccurate. They’re more like skilled archaeologists excavating their own legacy, dusting off the marble busts, and daring to carve a few new features while they’re at it. With the departure of Simon Cowell’s Psycho label and the tragic loss of Carlos Marín to COVID, the group faced the kind of existential fork in the road that most pop-classical acts never get close enough to even contemplate. Their response? Pull up their “big boy pants,” foot the entire bill themselves, and finally, after two decades of singing other people’s songs, write one of their own.
The album’s title, XX, is a clean, dramatic nod to two decades of high notes, power suits, and multilingual heartbreak ballads. “It all just kind of hit us like a ton of bricks,” says Miller. “We realized 2024 would mark 20 years, and it felt like time to start over without actually starting over.”
That’s no small ask for a group who cut their teeth turning pop ballads into symphonic thrill rides. “It’s like every song is an operatic finale,” Miller explains. “Every four minutes, I’m hitting a B flat, B natural, sometimes a D. And in one case, an E flat. Above high C. We don’t do that song much anymore.”
Fair.
The album includes pop covers given the signature Il Divo treatment—songs like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” transformed into multilingual, orchestra-backed epics. But it's the lone original composition, Despertar Sin Ti, that Miller refers to as both a breakthrough and a full-on breakdown. Written with fellow member Sébastien Izambard and producer Carlos Lopez, the song was composed in fits and starts, with the bridge being written the morning of the recording session.
“It was chaos,” Miller admits. “Seb writes pop. I’m a classical composer. I’d never collaborated. For me, it’s narcissistic—I write from the soul. He’s like, what serves the song? And I’m like, what serves my inner reflection?” The result? “People love it,” he says, somewhat baffled. “It was supposed to be a Plan B, and it’s become a fan favorite. Go figure.”
For Miller, the process of writing and singing these songs at 50—with COVID’s long tail and the unrelenting demands of their catalog—has become both a test and a statement. “We’ve gone from the eight-box Crayola to the 256 Crayola box,” he says. “But the crayons get worn down. You’re tired. Then you get new crayons—compensation techniques, really. But you forget you’re not tired anymore and you’re still using the tired crayons.”
Somewhere in that metaphor is the spiritual burden of fronting Il Divo. “We’re expected to deliver a grand moment every four minutes,” Miller says. “In opera, you might be onstage for 30 minutes total. We do that nonstop for 90. Five nights a week. For years. And people still want the note at the end. They want that gear.”
So how do you keep finding new material for a group that’s basically singing every song like it’s the closing scene of Les Misérables? Carefully. “We go through 50 to 200 songs to find 10 that work,” he says. “The melody can’t just sit there, it has to go somewhere. It needs romantic depth, emotional drama, harmonic movement… and you can’t have a bubblegum chorus in the middle of that.”
The pressure to deliver—onstage, in the studio, and now at the writing desk—has created a kind of beautiful madness. “With every album, the bar gets higher,” Miller says. “And the cruelest part is, we set it ourselves.”
The irony is not lost on him. Il Divo has spent 20 years proving that operatic voices can have a place on the pop charts—and now they’re being asked to prove it again, only without a safety net. Or a label. Or, sometimes, a melody they don’t have to invent in real time.
Still, Miller is proud of what they’ve built. “This album goes back to the beginning. We pretended Il Divo didn’t exist. What if we were making this for the first time? What would it sound like?”
Turns out, it would sound like Il Divo—but older, wiser, maybe a little crazier, and yes, still capable of pulling off an E flat above high C. At least when necessary.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
