“Nothing Feels Natural” is the title of Priests’ first full-length album, but it’s also a statement that could express the current state of the nation in the first few days of the Trump administration. For the last few years the Washington, D.C.-bred punks have garnered local acclaim for their feverish live sets, biting lyrics and fearless indictments of neoliberalism alongside expressions of general millennial malaise. “Art is inherently political,” lead singer Katie Alice Greer said in a recent Rolling Stone interview, and here Priests makes it clear that even within our private lives, politics remain inescapable.
On its face, album opener “Appropriate” seems like a raucous — if conventionally structured — riff on artifice and fake friendships. Yet its over five-minute runtime — practically epic for punk — is a vehicle for something less familiar. About halfway through, Greer falls silent and the upbeat instrumentation retreats into a strain of dissonant noise punctuated by strangled bursts of saxophone.
When she returns moaning, “I’ve worked too hard to have friends like you anymore,” she sounds genuinely weary from the toll her relationship has taken. As her voice rises in volume against the increasing cacophony, it seems like Greer is physically fighting her way through the song, translating her anger into a visceral confrontation with the listener.
This willingness to experiment with sound to maximize each song’s intensity characterizes the rest of the album as well. “JJ” is a surf rock-tinged tune which excoriates another past relationship with a stream of consciousness fluidity. Targeting “a rich kid low life in a very big jacket in a very big way,” “JJ” could be the tenser, more frenetic granddaughter of a Beach Boys song.
The title track sees Greer’s voice go breathy as she trades in her typical fiery delivery for something more plaintive, and its floaty, shimmering guitars recall The Cure’s early catalogue. “Suck” has funk in its DNA — the saxophone returns alongside a grooving beat as Greer describes a woman saying, “It’s always white boys like you obsessed with the police.”
While this sonic miscellany arguably sacrifices some cohesion, the album’s unifying element is its unrelenting interrogation of how powerful institutions color everyday life and mental health. “Nicki” addresses vulnerability head-on without making a spectacle of it, delivering lines like, “I don’t make friends easily or naturally / you can blame chemicals or you can blame patriarchy” with little more than a shrug.
Similarly, “No Big Bang,” a spoken-word track, deconstructs the fascination with mental illness over an increasingly anxious rhythm. Greer’s rapid-fire delivery feels unapologetically manic as she describes her fears of “the science and evolution and progress” that “looks good from a distance but when you’re really inside of it you realize it’s f—king terrifying.”
Even “Pink White House,” which invokes easy punk targets like SUV’s and the American Dream, delves deeper by questioning the rituals of “democracy” itself and imploring the listener to “consider the options of a binary.” Its best and weirdest lines come near the end, as Greer makes the narration unexpectedly intimate, telling the audience, “you are just a cog in the machine / and I am a wet dream soft and mean.”
Most of Priests’ lyricism similarly lacks any sense of resolution or closure, and the songs are meant to make us more conscious, not more comfortable. But in this day and age, discomfort might be exactly what we need.
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