"Nothing finishes": TV Priest on history, sediment and their first track in four years

“'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,” frontman Charlie Drinkwater explains. “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."

The accompanying video, shot over an afternoon by frequent collaborator Charles Gall, places Drinkwater alone in a disused office space, suit still on but shoes discarded, moving between stillness and physical release with an intensity that borders on the uncomfortable. “It needed to feel free but watched, paranoid, intense, and most importantly unashamed,” he says of the visual. “A body remembering it was never really tame.”

Where their earlier work often balanced jittery punk energy with moments of melodic reprieve, the new song opens on a restless bassline that quickly mutates into a clamour of clipped percussion, synthetic data noise and spoken-word fragments. Lyrically, the song circles a familiar axis for TV Priest – the weight of inheritance, both personal and political, and the uneasy sense that new paths are often just old ones with fresh gravel. The refrain “from womb to tomb to eternity” lands as a grimly pragmatic observation.