Among the most blogged new band is this punk band from Washington DC who also run the label Sister Polygon (Downtown Boys, Snail Mail). The title track to their debut LP is “a bracing anthem about the struggle to realize yourself against seemingly irresistible forces”
If any band has understood this in recent years, it’s Priests born and bred in Washington, D.C., operating under the notion that nothing about American systems or society is natural.
Nothing Feels Natural, the band’s first proper album after a couple of tapes, a 7″ single and 2014’s Bodies And Control And Money And Power EP, isn’t a direct response to the state of the nation so much as a state of mind. For Priests, the personal has always been political; the band recognizes that the self is fluid, and that how we interact with each other is just as vital as how we confront the world. That’s why Nothing Feels Natural, in 10 tracks that embody the spirit of punk — while fully embracing the R&B, pop and experimental layers that course through the band’s discography presents itself as a broken and abstract view of what it means to live in a broken and abstract society.
The album represents a step forward for Priests. It’s the band’s most stylistically diverse work, expanding on their lo-fi post-punk bona-fides with ideas drawn from pop, R&B, and industrial noise. Thematically, Nothing can be understood as a series of vignettes — nine stories that crystallize into a bigger picture about the economics of human relationships, the invisibility of feminized labor, and the theoretical dual purpose of art for the group and the individual. The album will be the first full-length LP released on Sister Polygon Records, the label that the band operates cooperatively.
But Nothing Feels Natural moves beyond the trappings of an album that speaks to a specific time: It wants to keep speaking with us.
band members, Daniele Daniele drums, Katie Alice Greer vocals, G.L. Jaguar guitar, Taylor Mulitz bass
The Fat Angel Sings 