prude BY DRUG CHURCH
PRUDE opens with a jolt: “Mad Care,” launches abruptly from a distant-sounding guitar intro into a roaring first verse. The lines “Romance takes hold rapid pace / She’s in love and you need a place” peel back an initial layer of optimism to reveal something ugly underneath. Dismal narratives like this are the nuts and bolts of Drug Church’s fifth full-length album, a magnifying glass onto life’s rough patches.
Tragedies ranging from romantic self-sabotage to child neglect punctuate PRUDE. The band has never shied away from bleak subject matter, but the new release does so with more sincerity than previous projects. This album came at a welcome time for me, the grating vocals and guitar lines guiding me through a particularly difficult death in the family.
Like always, Drug Church weaves vivid stories with its lyrics. Historically, these combine desolation and humor more or less fifty-fifty; my favorite example of this is “Attending a Cousin’s Birthday Party” from 2013’s Paul Walker.
But the band sheds most of its playfulness for a more straight-faced attitude this time around. “Hey Listen” sees this to a devastating extreme, reflecting on a missing person poster at a Walmart with the note “no more recent image.” Vocalist Patrick Kindlon sings, “That tells me something clear / They forgot about this kid / Years before he disappeared.”
Kindlon acknowledged PRUDE’s somber feel compared to past releases.
“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,” he said in a press release, “But I would say that this album approaches it from sort of a sad storytelling way. This one feels more earnest to me.”
The band does lean into a more tongue-in-cheek mentality with “Business Ethics,” the tale of a cousin who faked his own kidnapping to get money from his mom for drugs. “Now he works in finance” is the final punchline.
Though devastating, there is a catharsis to PRUDE’s overall earnestness, an opportunity for release in the poignancy of its lyrics and ferocity of its instrumentation. Perhaps we are seeing the band members maturing as people, learning to marinate more in difficult emotions.
Listen to PRUDE here. Out now via Pure Noise Records.
— Dora
