TV Priest are back, but the sermon’s not the same. “This is a song

about leisure, our fears and pleasures,” vocalist Charlie Drinkwater

announces as the group’s exhilarating new album growls into gear –

words that at Cirst may seem to signal more of what came before. After

all, the Sub Pop innovators have become one of Britain’s most vital

new bands on the back of furious songs about a world undone by dark

desires, both primal and political. But that sound Drinkwater

described, tapping into our leisures – “automatic dreams on 65”

screens,” the lyric continues – couldn’t feel more different this time

around. “It’s a pretty big evolution,” beams the frontman, reClecting on

how Cartoons sees TV Priest abandon their format post-punk pulpit.

The broadcast now is a little more tender. A little more melody mixed

in the Molotov cocktail. It’s the sound of a band thunderously reborn.

But arriving at it almost broke them apart.

“We had to have a self-reckoning about why we were doing this,” says

Drinkwater, who found himself in a place of existential crisis after the

success of their Cirst two albums. 2021’s Uppers and 2022’s My Other

People had catapulted the duo – Drinkwater and life-long collaborator

Alex Sprogis, who he met aged two – onto stages and playlists

worldwide. Signed to one of the most storied labels in indie music

history, the pair were championed by outlets like Pitchfork and

“playing all over the world, getting to do amazing things. But it was

weirdly discombobulating. To go from being someone that’s always

played in bands that no one’s ever really given a shit about to all this,”

the vocalist recalls, “was disorientating.” To quote Cartoons’ A Song

From The Riverbed: “I lost myself.” Some dark days grappling with

purpose, their position in the world – and even body image – followed.

Did TV Priest become ensnared in the exact thing their songs sought to

skewer? On coruscating tracks like early single ‘Runner Up’, the band –

then a four-piece – had Cired shots at late capitalism. But the more the

band grew, the more they felt a self-applied pressure to play more.

Record more. Release more. Be more productive. “I really felt that

upward bell curve of needing to ascend, ascend, ascend,” says

Drinkwater. It left his psyche in a rough state. “My mental health

wasn’t great. A lot of things had gotten mixed up in the whirlpool.”

Eventually, a conversation with his wife, with whom he’s now a parent,

helped turn the tide. “There was a point where she said to me, is this

worth it? Because it doesn’t seem to be making you happy.” The

vocalist realised then that happiness and joy – softer emotions he

carries and prizes as a person – weren’t well represented in TV

Priest’s music. Each night on stage, he felt expected to conjure a

certain anger, “like a boxing match where come out punching. It had to

have this certain kind of energy – a certain kind of aggression.” Just

one problem – this wasn’t him. It wasn’t wholly either of them, truth

be told.

So he and Sprogis went home to their families and day jobs, as a

designer and architect respectively. As they did, they began carefully

cooking up a new sonic identity for TV Priest. One forged from “a place

of deeper vulnerability and honesty,” he says. The currency of the

world in 2026 is anger. It’s what keeps us glued to our phones. It has

Cilled our streets. What would it look like to break from that, musically,

the pair began to wonder? “If I’m only reaching people through

aggression, what does that do? What does that feed back into the

world?” asks the frontman. “If you keep giving out breeze blocks as

birthday presents, you can expect them in return.”

The result was a record with surprising shades of REM, Radiohead,

The National and Foals – the Cire and philosophising of their previous

work still present, but now accompanied by a bigger sprawl of gentler

instruments. Piano. Fiddle. Bird song recordings ruptured and pieced

back together again, “exploring the intersection between digitalism

and nature.” Everything was on the table as the duo rewired their

sound. “This was the Cirst record that we wrote starting with an

acoustic guitar,” says Drinkwater. “Everything else has always begun in

a loud room.”

They still reach violent volumes as and when they elect to, on tracks

like lead single ‘The Mud Never Dies’, which the group call “the most

abrasive thing we’ve made.” Channelling drum and bass, it’s a song

that “never settles into one shape,” says Drinkwater. But elsewhere on

Cartoons, there are sensitive surprises. Its title track chronicles

watching animations with his child, wondering what sort of world

they’re destined to inherit. ‘I Am’ strips everything down to an

acoustic and Drinkwater’s naked vocal, while ‘Epping’ is an electronic

reverie that blooms and blooms with beauty.

“There’s a lot of lyrics about entropy,” says the frontman, “this idea

that we’re kind of living in a world of perpetual motion and perpetual

chaos, and the only way to

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