TV Priest share first new music in four years with The Mud Never Dries
TV Priest have released The Mud Never Dries, their first new music in four years, alongside a new video shot with Charles Gall.
The track wastes little time reintroducing the band’s more abrasive edges, driven by an accelerant bassline, jagged electronics and a restless, shapeshifting pulse. It follows the band’s two albums, Uppers and My Other People, but pushes into harsher terrain, pulling together drum and bass pressure, post-punk tension, electronic samples and spoken word.
Stream The Mud Never Dries here.
History as sediment
Lyrically, The Mud Never Dries turns on ideas of history, repetition and the weight of what gets carried forward. Its central image is one of the past refusing to settle into the distance, instead building into the ground beneath the present.
Vocalist Charlie Drinkwater said: “The Mud Never Dries is the most abrasive thing we’ve made, a collision of drum and bass, post-punk, electronic data samples and spoken word that doesn’t settle into any one shape. We wrote it thinking about history as sediment. 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.
“My own history, our shared political one, the same loop, the same refusal to look down or look back. The title felt honest in that way. Nothing dries. Nothing finishes. We keep stepping in it.”
A dead office space and an untamed performance
The accompanying video places Drinkwater alone in an empty office, suited but shoeless, moving through a performance that mirrors the track’s escalating unease. Shot over an afternoon with Charles Gall, the clip leans into the song’s sense of surveillance, rupture and release.
Drinkwater said: “The Mud Never Dries is about the moment the mask of history slips and we ask ourselves if we’re just doomed to repeat it. We wanted the video to reflect that; it needed to feel free but watched, paranoid, intense, and most importantly unashamed.
“Shot over an afternoon with my close collaborator Charles Gall it shows me left alone in a dead office space, suit on and shoes off, finally giving in to something animal and letting a performance pour out of me. A body remembering it was never really tame.”
