TV Priest trade fire for fiddle strings on new album ‘Cartoons’

TV Priest have never exactly been a band to shy away from the big, thorny questions — but on new album ‘Cartoons’, out 6th November via AMK / Kartel Music Group, they’re pointing the lens inward for the first time, and the results sound genuinely unguarded.

Alongside the announcement comes lead single Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon) — a swirl of strings, synths and darting electronics that trades the band’s usual abrasion for something softer, braver, and a lot more exposed.

It follows June’s The Mud Never Dries, the band’s first new music in four years and a proper reintroduction: all shapeshifting drum and bass, post-punk grit, and spoken word data-collage. If that track announced TV Priest were back, Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon) shows what they’ve been doing with the time.

“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. 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. 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.” — Charlie Drinkwater

Following 2021’s ‘Uppers’ and 2022’s ‘My Other People’, ‘Cartoons’ finds the band widening their palette considerably — piano, fiddle, ruptured bird song recordings — while American alt rock leans up against electronic production. Think REM and Radiohead colliding with The National and Foals, but still unmistakably TV Priest underneath.

“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.” — Charlie Drinkwater

“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.” — Charlie Drinkwater

“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.” — Charlie Drinkwater

Watch the video for Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon) below.

Pre-order / pre-save ‘Cartoons‘ now.

‘Cartoons’ track listing

1. Just So You Know
2. Cartoons
3. Ultraviolet Blue
4. The Mud Never Dries
5. A Song From The Riverbed
6. Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)
7. Into Shape
8. Daily Recommendations
9. I Am
10. Epping

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

Find TV Priest

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