TV Priest have announced their third album Cartoons, due 6th November via AMK and Kartel Music Group, alongside lead single ‘Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)’.
The announcement follows June’s ‘The Mud Never Dries’, the band’s first new music in four years: a abrasive, shapeshifting collision of drum and bass, post-punk and spoken word. ‘Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)’ arrives as its deliberate counterpart, bringing together strings, synths and darting electronics in a track built around emotional openness rather than confrontation.
It is, notably, the first time TV Priest have written a song explicitly about romantic love. “Love motivated us to form the band, yet we’d never written a song exploring romantic love or addressed it as a statement of love to our partners,” vocalist Charlie Drinkwater has said. “This was a shedding of any artifice and an expression of desire. We wanted to explore how love is both domestic and extraordinary. It’s in the washing up done without asking, or the flowers bought on the way home from work, but it’s also in the grand gestures and the late-night conversations.” Love, in Drinkwater’s framing, is also political: “a weapon for righteous change and goodness. A statement of resistance when the current world’s mood music seems to be hatred and violence.”
Cartoons was written over two quiet years by Drinkwater and guitarist Alex Sprogis, with a wider cast of collaborators brought in as the songs developed. The result is their most communal and most expansive record: American alt-rock leans against electronic production; organic field recordings and birdsong sit alongside digital data samples and dance-influenced low end; piano and fiddle join guitars and programmed drums. Drinkwater describes an album of surprising shades: REM, Radiohead, The National and Foals among the reference points, the fire and philosophising of their previous work present but now accompanied by a broader instrumental palette. Most significantly, Drinkwater stopped hiding. “For the first time, I stopped being afraid to sing; to carry a melody out in the open, unguarded, without the old reflex to undercut or hide something.”
A UK in-store run accompanies the album’s November release.
6 Nov – Rough Trade Denmark Street, London (two performances)
7 Nov – Crash, Leeds
8 Nov – Jacaranda, Liverpool
9 Nov – Rough Trade, Bristol
11 Nov – Banquet x Fighting Cocks, Kingston
12 Nov – Pie & Vinyl, Southsea
