Drug Church is #1, so why try harder? Truer words may have never been spoken (or emblazoned upon merch that may or may not reference a novelty shirt seen on a 1998 Fatboy Slim album cover). For over a decade, Drug Church have been building a very strong case that they’re the best loud guitar band in the game; their fifth full-length PRUDE–a 28-minute blast of aggression, melody, irreverence, and genuine heart–feels like the undeniable proof. The album is so downright satisfying it tricks you into thinking there’s nothing all that surprising about a difficult-to-pigeonhole punk band from Albany, NY, with a name like Drug Church somehow having a career at all, much less one that would last over 10 years and qualify them as the best band going. But before you start trying to think of who might have them beat (good luck), consider what just might be the key to Drug Church’s unexpected staying power: Don’t take it too seriously.
“I think at this point I’m at peace with the fact that I’m not a musician–I’m a band guy,” laughs vocalist Patrick Kindlon. “I’m just a guy in a band. It works because there’s a drive to express myself and we’re good enough at this that we’re allowed to do it–but I’m never gonna try to sell myself as a person that’s pushing boundaries or is super clever. I make music because I enjoy it.” This ‘the mystique is that there is no mystique’ mentality isn’t so much a guiding principle as it is a dose of honesty. In a world where everyone is telling you how game-changing their material is, part of what makes Drug Church so special is that they seem to be extraordinarily good at being themselves. The band–Kindlon, guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha, bassist Pat Wynne, and drummer Chris Villeneuve–arrived fully-formed in 2011 with a singular amalgamation of eye-popping aggression, bulletproof hooks, and incisive lyricism, and rather than reinventing themselves on every record, they’ve simply aimed to get better and better at a sound they can actually call their own. “Doing something really leftfield isn’t really our ambition,” Kindlon explains. “The goal is to put out good records that sound like we do–we’re not trying to do an OK Computer. But I do think that when you just do something well, you hit a point where people think they have a complete understanding of who you are.”
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.
