New music review with singles from M(h)aol and TV Priest
Our weekly fix of the best new music as Julia Mason (aka The Decibel Decoder) brings us her new music review with singles from M(h)aol Scam Manifesto and TV Priest Just So You Know
Artist: M(h)aol
Track: Scam Manifesto
Irish post-punk firebrands M(h)aol are excited to release their new single Scam Manifesto via Merge Records and Tulle. The band’s first new release since their acclaimed album Something Soft, the track is accompanied by a new music video and is out today on all streaming platforms.
“Scam Manifesto is a song I wrote during one of my semi-regular social media breaks,” Constance Keane (drums/vocals, she/her) says. “My entire feed was 'how to lose the last 5 lbs’ and obituaries for people I didn’t know. It’s about the guilt I feel about my own hypocrisy. Publicly, I say that as a woman it’s my right to be as ugly and old as I want and still value myself, while privately I was consistently fixating on a list of things I would change about my appearance. It’s about having one rule for others and another one for yourself.”
Formed in Dublin, the band have established themselves as one of contemporary Irish post-punk’s most distinctive voices, channelling rage, humour, empathy, and vulnerability into cathartic songs. The current lineup features Keane (drums/vocals), Jamie Hyland (bass/vocals, she/her), and Sean Nolan (guitar/he/him), whose chemistry has helped shape the band’s increasingly dynamic approach to songwriting and live performances.
On Scam Manifesto, M(h)aol are joined by Pixie Cut Rhythm Orchestra’s Sarah Deegan (she/her) on backing vocals. The new single finds M(h)aol continuing to make music that is both deeply personal and impossible to separate from the world around it.
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Artist: TV Priest
Track: Just So You Know
TV Priest recently announced new album Cartoons for release on 6 November via AMK / Kartel Music Group and now release new single Just So you Know' alongside a run of UK headline tour dates. These arrive in early 2027, after the band's release week UK instore shows, and a newly-announced Halloween show at London's Blondie's as special guests to Crows.
The new single Just So You Know quickly morphs into a groove-heavy, muscular indie burner. Layers of instrumentation twist, melt, and reconstitute themselves around poignant and hook-led vocals, once again highlighting both the subtle compositional intricacies of Cartoons as well as their forthright approach to songwriting.
Talking about the new single, vocalist Charlie Drinkwater says: "Just So You Know is a break up song, only the other half is technology. I'm scrolling before I've even really had a single thought of my own. The stress sits in my stomach like bad coffee and the people I love get whatever attention is left over. And there's a sweetness to it, and that's the trouble. Always connected, always ticking things off a to do list that never gets any shorter. Little sugar hits all day long until the crash. The song pokes at that and it asks the question I keep swerving: is any of this actually any good for me? Is it good for any of us?"
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."
TV Priest Live Dates
October
31 - Blondies, London (Special Guests to Crows)
November
6 - Rough Trade Denmark Street, London (two performances instore)
7 - Crash, Leeds (instore)
8 - Jacaranda, Liverpool (instore)
9 - Rough Trade, Bristol (instore)
11 - Banquet x Fighting Cocks, Kingston (instore)
12 - Pie & Vinyl, Southsea (instore)
2027
January
25 - The Louisiana, Bristol
26 - Hare & Hounds 2, Birmingham, UK
27 - The George Tavern, London, UK
28 - Green Door Store, Brighton, UK
30 - The Abbey, Manchester, UK
31 - McChuills, Glasgow, UK
February
1 - Oporto, Leeds, UK
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