TV PRIEST share new single ‘Cartoons’
Watch the video HERE
New album Cartoons out 6th November on AMK / Kartel Music Group
Instore shows and UK headline tour dates on sale now
TV Priest | Photo credit: Charles Gall
TV Priest are today sharing the title track from their forthcoming album Cartoons, which is set for release on 6th November via AMK / Kartel Music Group. With recent singles ranging from the abrasive (‘The Mud Never Dries‘), to the brooding (‘Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon‘), and the muscular ‘Just So You Know‘, new single ‘Cartoons’ is in many ways TV Priest’s flag in the sand for the new album, a moment where its overall message is at its clearest. Cantering, fleet-footed guitar riffs tumble and twist, elevating its themes of digital overload and dystopia.
Talking about the new single, vocalist Charlie Drinkwater says: “Cartoons covers most of what we wanted to say on this record. A life lived in multicolour and at full speed where casually cruelty and mundane distraction share a bed and neither one really sleeps. I’m asking who the winners and losers are on any given Tuesday, who picks up the pieces afterwards, and who gets to pin a rosette on their chest for it. It was the breakthrough on the album. Everything we’d been circling, inward and outward, the political and the personal, went into a simpler shape that gets its hooks in and won’t let go.”
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.
Hear ‘Cartoons’ on streaming services here, and watch the video below.
TV Priest UK tour poster
Tickets for all TV Priest shows are on sale now here.
TV Priest UK 2026 shows
31st Oct – Blondies, London (tickets here)
6th Nov – Rough Trade Denmark Street, London (two performances instore)
7th Nov – Crash, Leeds (instore)
8th Nov – Jacaranda, Liverpool (instore)
9th Nov – Rough Trade, Bristol (instore)
11th Nov – Banquet x Fighting Cocks, Kingston (instore)
12th Nov – Pie & Vinyl, Southsea (instore)
TV Priest UK headline tour dates 2027
25 Jan 2027 – The Louisiana, Bristol, UK
26 Jan 2027 – Hare & Hounds 2, Birmingham, UK
27 Jan 2027 – The George Tavern, London, UK
28 Jan 2027 – Green Door Store, Brighton, UK
30 Jan 2027 – The Abbey, Manchester, UK
31 Jan 2027 – McChuills, Glasgow, UK
01 Feb 2027 – Oporto, Leeds, UK
TV Priest – Cartoons album art
TV Priest – Cartoons album tracklisting:
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