TV Priest are still standing out from the post-punk crowd on their second studio album.
There is a universal but not well publicised side to the human condition which can be applied most to those who get success before they’re ready for it; 99 times out of 100, it comes with baggage and keeps receipts.
Musicians, especially those locked into the industry’s relentless pump-and-dump hype cycle, are more victims of this than many others across the arts and, despite their relative underground status, TV Priest are as eloquent an illustration of the syndrome as any other.
Barely formed, their coruscating 2019 debut single House Of York won the quartet of Londoners a deal with Sub-Pop for their widely acclaimed first album, Uppers.
Dropping during lockdown, its impact still surprised the band – singer Charlie Drinkwater later admitting: ‘I wasn’t prepared…It was all very quick. It felt kind of divorced from reality’.
In considering the follow-up however, the search for a repeat and a consistency of sound remained a futile one, Drinkwater positing: ‘Why would I keep making art if I didn’t believe that the best thing was not around the corner?’.
The outcome of following their ears in a world where post-punk has become exceedingly commoditised, on My Other People they continue to stand apart from many supposed peers.
In practice it mixes an ironclad austerity with an often brutal undertow, and lyrics that come from a place for Drinkwater in which recent experience had been a chastening guide.
Opener One Easy Thing is atonal, scraping feedback and white noise chopped out over low-punching bass – ‘Life only comes in flashes of greatness’, growls the singer in what passes for a chorus, its essence a recognition that any safety net we see is an illusory one.
Part of the band’s appeal is a bleakness married to energy; I Am Safe Here jitters with an eye-popping, super dry funk, but its dancefloor appeal is tempered by lines like, ‘To be conscious/Is to be cursed’, the song offering a pithy reverse celebration of movement as a means of forgetting everything else.
Conversely, there is also at its core an understanding that if nothing else sharing this sentiment with an empty room is futile. It Was A Gift opens at an angle, but the light in it scratches away to the surface like a cat in a bag, whilst Bury Me In My Shoes drags itself outside like we all did after being cooped up; a song about dealing with life’s minutiae, it fades like resolve sometimes does.
Keeping things this simple sounds easier in theory than it proves to be in practice – maybe that’s the point. Limehouse Cut is an abstraction, the pace slowed, a grit-flecked picture of how easy it is to become exiled from where you live by tiny but equilibrium-shredding changes, whilst the Happiest Place On Earth is a sinuous ballad with disorientating side effects of its own.
There are antecedents here; Idles; the clattering punk of Detroit’s ever visceral Protomartyr; even a blue Evan Dando, but the best moment belongs to none of them, It Was Beautiful splitting qualities up, a majestic crawl forward on all fours that finishes one or two paces back from the ledge of greatness.
You can’t always get what you want and when you get it you probably don’t want it anyway. Words to live by, and for TV Priest to use and ignore on My Other People as they see fit.
It’s hard to embrace, otherwise what’s everything for. You can listen to this record whilst making your mind up.
