Photo credit: Charles Gail
Charlie Drinkwater is back at his sermonic best, repenting after four years in the wilderness after the excellent My Other People covered here. It’s utterly bonkers, combining techno industrial beats in a drum & bass hip hop style that defies genres and makes a mighty leap forward from their earlier sound. A gritty spoken word bastard that deserves repeat listening as a taster for the third TV Priest album yet to come. Read on…
TV Priest return today with perhaps their boldest new music to date. New single ‘The Mud Never Dries’ is their first release in four years.
Immediately leaping into life with an accelerant bassline that ignites the song into a volley of caustic, shapeshifting sounds, ‘The Mud Never Dries’ feels like it’s on a mission to outrun itself, in something of an echo of the song’s themes of the inescapable.
Through two albums (2021’s Uppers, 2022’s My Other People), TV Priest have stood out as a probing, curious group with a talent for wrapping their arms around the existential, and connecting the disconnected. New single ‘The Mud Never Dries’ may well be the most abrasive thing to come from the band, but their natural thoughtful state remains. On it they consider the weight of history, the things that we carry from our both our personal and collective pasts that shape us whether we like it or not. The cycle of new replacing old never breaking, new paths continually being forged. “From womb to tomb to eternity” go the lyrics.
Talking about the new song, vocalist Charlie Drinkwater says: “‘The Mud Never Dries’ is the most abrasive thing we’ve made, a collision of drum and bass, post-punk, electronic data samples and spoken word that doesn’t settle into any one shape. We wrote it thinking about history as sediment. The way the past doesn’t really leave us. It settles, layer on layer, until we’re walking on ground we don’t recognise but somehow keep retracing. My own history, our shared political one, the same loop, the same refusal to look down or look back. The title felt honest in that way. Nothing dries. Nothing finishes. We keep stepping in it.”
Continuing about the video, he says: “‘The Mud Never Dries’ is about the moment the mask of history slips and we ask ourselves if we’re just doomed to repeat it. We wanted the video to reflect that; it needed to feel free but watched, paranoid, intense, and most importantly unashamed. Shot over an afternoon with my close collaborator Charles Gall it shows me left alone in a dead office space, suit on and shoes off, finally giving in to something animal and letting a performance pour out of me. A body remembering it was never really tame.”
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