Nothing Feels Natural

The Artist

Priests are a Washington, D.C. post-punk band who emerged from the city's DIY scene in the early 2010s, built around vocalist Katie Alice Greer, guitarist G.L. Jaguar, drummer Daniele Daniele, and bassist Taylor Mulitz. They cut their teeth releasing cassettes and EPs on their own label, Sister Polygon, becoming a rallying point for a new wave of politically charged American underground rock. Their sound blends jagged post-punk, surf guitar, no wave dissonance, and confrontational spoken-sung vocals with a sharp critique of American life. Nothing Feels Natural, released in early 2017, is their proper full-length debut after years of shorter releases, and it marks the moment they widened their palette well beyond their earlier abrasive punk.

The Album

Nothing Feels Natural arrived in January 2017 via Sister Polygon, recorded with producer Kevin Erickson and mixed to preserve the band's live physicality while opening space for saxophone, strings, and piano flourishes. The sessions found Priests deliberately stretching past hardcore-adjacent brevity, folding in surf rock, lounge jazz, and dub-inflected grooves without losing their post-punk backbone. Thematically the record wrestles with identity, consumerism, surveillance, gendered performance, and the queasy feeling of living inside late-capitalist America, landing with uncanny timing just as a new political era began. Greer's vocals swing from deadpan speech to unhinged wail, framing the album as both personal and pointedly political. It was widely embraced as one of the year's essential indie rock statements.

Listen For

Saxophone as a second voice. Listen to how horns snake through "JJ" and the title track, pushing the arrangements toward something closer to noir jazz than straight punk.

Vocal shape-shifting. Track how Katie Alice Greer moves between sneering spoken word, melodic croon, and full-throated scream, sometimes within a single song like "Nicki."

Surf and spy-movie guitar. G.L. Jaguar's reverb-soaked tremolo lines on "Appropriate" and "Pink White House" pull from surf rock and 60s spy soundtracks more than hardcore.

The rhythm section as engine. Notice how bass and drums lock into hypnotic, danceable grooves on "Puff" and "Nothing Feels Natural," giving the chaos overhead a solid floor.

A deliberate mid-album breather. "Interlude" resets the pacing with something quieter and more textural, splitting the record into two distinct emotional halves.