TV Priest — currently, Charlie Drinkwater (vocals) and Alex Sporgis (guitar) — will be releasing their third album Cartoons on November 5, 2026 through AMK/Kartel Music Group. With their first two album’s 2021’s Uppers and 2022’s My Other People, the British punk outfit have stood out as a probing, curious group with a talent for wrapping their arms around the existential, and connecting the disconnected.
Cartoons however, emerges from the wreckage of self-reckoning, with the band finding new ways of being — and writing music from a different starting point. The result is an album of material with shades of REM, Radiohead, The National and Foals. The fire and philosophizing of their previously released work is still there, but accompanied by a bigger sprawl of gentler instrumentation, including piano, fiddle, birdsong recordings sampled, then ruptured and pieced back together again to explore “the intersection between digtalism and nature.” As they began to complete rework their sound, everything was on the table.
The band’s Charlie Drinkwater says of the album, “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.”
Cartoons will include the previously released “The Mud Never Dries,” and the album’s second and latest single “Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon).” “Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)” is a mediative, slow-burning song that seemingly channels Radiohead and The National with the song built around a gorgeous string arrangement, broodingly atmospheric and swirling electronics, what sounds like twinkling and darting synths beneath Drinkwater’s yearning baritone croon. Arguably one of the most unabashedly and unashamedly candid and vulnerable songs of the band’s catalog, “Love Song” is a both a contented sigh and earnest expression of gratitude, full of the recognition that love is often complicated, frustrating yet always deeply rewarding; that love is what makes us whole and sustains us in the most difficult, brutal times of our lives — and when everything is desperate, shitty and in flames.
“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. This was a response to that: a shedding of any artifice and an expression of desire,” Charlie Drinkwater explains. “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, or the personal wonder when you learn something new about someone despite all those years together. And, after all, 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 (or at least we are led to believe).”
The accompanying video is a collection of surreal imagery including Drinkwater walking through a field with a heart-shaped balloon Other times, he’s on a landline phone with a long extension cord baring his soul on the phone, as well as the band’s core duo in a bare studio space.