When the band Priests released their EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power in 2015, the embodiment, in their home city of Washington D.C., of control, money, and power wasn’t yet a certain Donald Trump. But the singer Katze Alice Greer was already attacking Trump’s predecessors: one song goes, “Barack Obama killed something in me / and I’m gonna get him for it.” Priests grew out of a nation-wide network of art, DIY, and punk communities, a counter- and parallel culture organized around a web of fan zines, basement shows, and student debt. And what in 2015 sounded like radical outsider rhetoric has become, in 2017, relevant. In “Pink White House,” Greer sings, “A puppet show in which you’re made to feel like you participate / Sign a letter, throw your shoe, vote for numbers 1 or 2,” and these lines are driven by a quivering, jerking punk you might even be tempted to write with an F. Priests themselves would be the last people to accept results in resignation—every song on the new album Nothing Feels Natural is an anarchist cheer for resistance against prevailing conditions (“No, Not Me”) and simultaneously an anthem for the defense of self-built structures (“I Build it Up All Around Me”). This band would get the popular vote, and far beyond the borders of Washington D.C. 

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