Former Priests frontperson Katie Alice Greer has announced her solo debut, Barbarism, which will be out June 24 via FourFour Records. She wrote, produced and recorded the entire thing herself.
The first single is "FITS/My Love Can’t Be," an intense, nightmarish song with barrelling drums. It was influenced by her experiences in Los Angeles in May 2020 and the contrast of pandemic lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests. “I’d spent something like 70 days mostly alone since the pandemic started,” Greer says. “Then one weekend I biked out to Fairfax Avenue and found myself amongst thousands of people. It was jarring...To go from mostly the stillness of a barely-lived-in bedroom to projectile shopping carts, strangers chanting, phalanxes of beige gun toters, and tanks parallel parked outside luxury underwear and grocery shops on Melrose. Stuff was on fire. I think I listened to Exile On Main Street headed home, because it's similarly contradictory and complicated mixture of emotions felt resonant. I wanted to try and capture all that I was feeling without so much as re-telling events that inspired the emotions themselves."