TV Priest – The Mud Never Dries
TV Priest are back with “The Mud Never Dries,” their first new music in four years, out now via Kartel Music Group. After 2021’s Uppers and 2022’s My Other People, this is a real departure: a breakbeat blast of drum and bass colliding head-on with post-punk tension, fractured electronics, and spoken word, none of it settling into one shape for long.
Charlie Drinkwater calls it the most abrasive thing the band has made, and the idea behind it is bigger than the noise suggests. “We wrote it thinking about history as sediment,” he says. “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.” That image of sediment does a lot of work here, the sense that nothing you’ve lived through actually goes away, it just keeps accumulating underneath whatever comes next, personal history and shared political history both compacting into the same ground. The track’s restless shapeshifting feels like the right form for that idea: a song that refuses to settle is a strange but fitting match for a lyric about things that won’t stay buried.
The video, shot in a single afternoon with longtime collaborator Charles Gall, sets Drinkwater alone in a dead office space, suit on and shoes off, building toward an increasingly unhinged performance. It mirrors the song’s sense of confinement and repetition without spelling it out too literally. Rolling Stone UK has already added the track to their Hot New Songs playlist alongside Blossoms, Hot Chip, and Lynks, good company for a band re-entering after this long a silence.
