TV Priest Announce New Album ‘Cartoons’

TV Priest are today announcing new album Cartoons for release on 6th November via AMK / Kartel Music Group. The band are also sharing the album’s lead single ‘Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)‘.

The return of TV Priest was recently heralded by their first new music in four years with June’s single ‘The Mud Never Dries‘, an abrasive, shapeshifting collision of drum and bass, post-punk, electronic data samples and spoken word. Today’s new offering brings together strings, synths and darting electronics to showcase another side of the band, one that operates candidly, vulnerable and brooding.

Talking about the new single, vocalist Charlie Drinkwater says: “Love motivated us to form the band, yet we’d never written a song exploring romantic love or addressed it as a statement of love to our partners. This was a response to that: a shedding of any artifice and an expression of desire. We wanted to explore how love is both domestic and extraordinary.

It’s in the washing up done without asking, or the flowers bought on the way home from work but it’s also in the grand gestures, the late-night conversations, or the personal wonder when you learn something new about someone despite all those years together. And, after all, love is a weapon for righteous change and goodness. It’s a statement of resistance when the current world’s mood music seems to be hatred and violence (or at least we are led to believe).”

Through two previous 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. Cartoons emerges from the wreckage of self-reckoning, finding new ways of being, and writing music from a different starting point. The result is a record with surprising shades of REM, Radiohead, The National and Foals – the fire 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 they rewired their sound.

Continuing about forthcoming album Cartoons, he says: “Cartoons is a record about confusion. About the small, daily unspooling of the worlds we thought we knew, and the strange new ones being born in their slipstream. About heroes and villains and the increasingly thin and trembling line between them. About surveillance and sanctuary, and where, exactly, a person is allowed to disappear. About me, and sometimes about you.

Cartoons began in slowing down. Alex Sprogis and I wrote it over two quiet years, and somewhere in that time we stopped guarding our front door. We let the room get crowded with collaborators, friends, and a wider cast of players. The songs grew louder and stranger and more tender for it. It is the most communal thing we’ve ever made, and the most exposed.

It is also, somehow, our most direct record and our most expansive. The songs come for you quicker now; the choruses are not embarrassed to mean what they say. But underneath, the ground has shifted. American alt rock leans against electronic production. Alex’s guitars run into programmed drums, organic field recordings, digital data samples, and a low end that takes cues from dance production. And for the first time, I stopped being afraid to sing; to carry a melody out in the open, unguarded, without the old reflex to undercut or hide something. There is hiss and choir, machine and breath.

If we used to point the lens outward, this time we turned it back on ourselves. Cartoons is more personally political: a record about how I try, and very often fail, to move through late capitalism, work, family, love and the long weather of my own interior. There is anger in it, but also tenderness; and grief that has stopped lying to itself. Not resolution. Just company, out in the noisy world.”

Pre-order/pre-save new album Cartoons HERE.

TV Priest UK instore shows 2026

6th Nov – Rough Trade Denmark Street, London (two performances)
7th Nov – Crash, Leeds
8th Nov – Jacaranda, Liverpool
9th Nov – Rough Trade, Bristol
11th Nov – Banquet x Fighting Cocks, Kingston
12th Nov – Pie & Vinyl, Southsea