Uppers

Four childhood friends who made music together as teenagers before drifting apart and then, somewhat inevitably, back together late in 2019, TV Priest was borne out of a need to create together once again and brings with it a wealth of experience and exhaustion picked up in the band’s years of pursuing “real life” and “real jobs,” something those teenagers never had.

Last November, the band – vocalist Charlie Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, bass and keys player Nic Bueth and drummer Ed Kelland – played their first show, to a smattering of friends in what they describe as an “industrial freezer” in the warehouse district of Hackney Wick. The gig might’ve seemed innocuous – not to mention humorous – at the time, but it remains their only live gig to date, and may well end up going down in legend. Having pencilled in gigs for the rest of 2020 and readied debut single “House Of York,” a searing examination of the Monarchy set over wiry post-punk and fronted by a Mark E. Smith-like mouthpiece in Charlie, the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a precedent for launching a band during a global pandemic, but among the general sense of anxiety and unease pervading everything at the moment, TV Priest’s entrance in April with the release of “House Of York” served as a breath of fresh air among the chaos, its anger and confusion making some kind of twisted sense to the nation’s fried brains.

It’s the same continued global sense of anxiety that will greet the release of ‘Uppers’, and it’s an album that has a lot to say right now. Taking musical cues from post-punk stalwarts The Fall and Protomartyr as well as the mechanical, pulsating grooves of krautrock, it’s a record that moves with an untamed energy.