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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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