DRUG CHURCH – ANNOUNCE ALBUM “PRUDE” / SHARE VIDEO “DEMOLITION MAN”

Of course, in true Drug Church fashion, PRUDE rejects that kind of oversimplification, instead demanding attention and keeping it through sheer force of will. Produced and engineered by longtime collaborator Jon Markson, the album makes it very clear that Drug Church haven’t stopped pushing themselves and still have more than a few tricks up their collective sleeve. PRUDE begins with the 20-second misdirect of a far away guitar that introduces “Mad Care.” The song then suddenly launches into the kind of hyper-catchy mix of hardcore and ‘90s alternative at which Drug Church’s instrumentalists excel, while Kindlon (with his signature roar that’s halfway between singing and barking and somehow just as hooky as Cogan’s earworm guitar leads) spits out a portrait of bad circumstances and even worse choices.

Kindlon’s ability to walk a tightrope between harrowing, hilarious, and heartfelt is crucial to Drug Church’s alchemy, but for someone whose writing style is perhaps most known for being cuttingly sardonic, PRUDE unexpectedly leans into that third H. “I’m hesitant to say this album is more emotional, but I think there’s definitely some emotional songs on the record,” he explains. “I wanted to avoid some of the topics I’ve been hammering for years, but I almost can’t, I’m limited to what interests me, or upsets me, or grabs my attention. So there’s certainly classic Drug Church stuff–people derailing their lives, a strong pull to some type of individualism, frustration with mob mentality, this idea that maybe community isn’t what it’s sold as–but I would say that this album approaches it from sort of a sad storytelling way. This one feels more earnest to me.”

No song better exemplifies this than “Hey Listen,” with lyrics that describe seeing a missing persons bulletin in the Walmart near the remote recording studio where the band made PRUDE. “This idea that there’s just a class of children that’s not even considered, it’s just very upsetting to me,” Kindlon says. “The notion that you could be not even a runaway, but a throwaway kid–that you could go missing and someone wouldn’t even look into it for a week.” It’s a dark and deeply affecting song juxtaposed by some of the sunniest guitar lines Cogan and Galusha have put in a Drug Church song.

Throughout PRUDE, the band continuously pull off this core magic trick: messy characters and knotty ideas delivered through massive hooks. See “Slide 2 Me,” where they forcefully push these elements towards opposite poles to phenomenal result: the story of a botched liquor store robbery wrapped in a guitar riff that would make Stephan Jenkins jealous and Kindlon’s delivery at its most outright melodic. Or “Business Ethics,” where the singer recounts the inspired-by-true-events hijinks of a drug-fueled self-kidnapping scheme across a song that sounds like Copper Blue performed by Slapshot.

Elsewhere songs like “Chow” and “The Bitters” lament a kind of misguided moralizing and sanctimony. “It just feels like everyone in the past 10 years or so seems to believe they’ve tripped into being right–and with that comes righteousness. So you stand in judgment and come off like an annoying dickhead,” Kindlon laughs. As always with Drug Church, while there’s an ingrained irreverence in his lyrical venting, there’s also a real sense of frustration and sadness around the undeniable callousness that’s seeped into everyday life–and become dismayingly mundane. “You see this in every culture, but particularly in desperate ones,” Kindlon says. “Like in prison culture–you’re looking for the permissible population to abuse. You’re looking for the guy with a charge worse than yours so that you can crack a skull, because cracking skulls is your outlet.”

PRUDE comes to a close with two songs that continue to highlight how far Drug Church have actually come. “Yankee Trails” and “Peer Review” are some of the most anthemic tracks the band have ever written, which is a tall order for a group of musicians who seem to have stage-dive-inducing-shout-along as their default songwriting setting. Both are powered by Wynne and Villeneuve’s thunderous rhythm section, but Cogan and Galusha’s guitars are equal parts distortion and texture, pivoting on a dime between bite and shimmer. On “Yankee Trails,” Kindlon describes a friend’s cross-country struggle to kick a drug habit with the kind of granular detail that rings heartrendingly true, and then on “Peer Review,” he makes it crystal clear that there isn’t an ounce of judgment in this or any of the hard luck stories that populate the album. “I’m just not at all interested in judging people,” he says. “I can have a laugh, I’m not immune to people’s missteps being entertaining, but I have zero interest in filing anyone under good or bad. People seem to want you to die in your mistakes and I just don’t share that at all. I think the mistakes people are capable of making is a continuous theme in our work, and maybe we played it for laughs a little more in the past, but I’m a little more somber on it now.”

So is this all indicative of some kinder, gentler Drug Church? Is it clean guitars and sincerity from here? Is this where the edges soften and hard-earned longevity gives way to a slow descent into mediocrity? Of course not. Don’t take it too seriously, don’t overthink it. As the final words of PRUDE say: “Too much time inside your own head / you lost sight of what it is.” It’s Drug Church. They’re #1.

DRUG CHURCH ALBUM ‘PRUDE’ OUT 4TH OCTOBER 2024 PURE NOISE RECORDS