Punk’s Most Contrarian Wise-Ass Is Much More Than That
There’s a kid outside the Drug Church show who looks like a character from one of their songs. Slumped on the curb outside a New Jersey dive called Salty’s Beach Bar, he has his shaggy head resting on his knees; by his feet is an empty can of Demolition Man IPA, named for the band’s last single. He looks so utterly miserable that several strangers stop dancing to the blaring Nineties playlist to check in on him. Maybe his date ditched him. Maybe his friends didn’t show. Or maybe he, like many folks in the New York hardcore band’s discography, is just down and out.
Inside, the mood isn’t quite as dire. Frontman Patrick Kindlon holds court, declaring to a crowd of pogoing punks of varying degrees of maturation: “I’m running for office on the platform of no drops in the pit!” It’s a reference to Joe Biden — who just stepped down from the presidential race earlier that day — but juxtaposed with the dude on the curb, it’s also pretty indicative of the band’s M.O. Their music is full of life’s many indignities, sure, but there’s also a kind of raw humanity to it all. A sympathetic touch. And that’s probably best encapsulated in the band’s upcoming fifth studio album, PRUDE, out Oct. 4 via Pure Noise Records. Their latest single, “Chow,” drops today.
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Drug Church — which started as a side project for Kindlon back in 2011, when his main gig was in the Albany, New York, band Self Defense Family — has always had a kind of magical alchemy. The riffs are big and dumb and fun, and Kindlon’s lyrics are equal parts poetic and cutting. On “Demolition Man,” he may envy the simplicity of a dog’s existence: “Saw a video of some working dogs/Each so happy to do what he does/Muddy fur chasing herds four-wheeler rides/Running sheep smile wide deep sleep full life.” But then, on the acidic “Bitters,” he proclaims: “Wishing failure on a stranger/Eat shit until you choke.”
Kindlon himself is kind of a study in contradictions: a charismatic frontman who also hates being in band photos and openly despises music videos, an acerbic contrarian who’s also kind of an elder statesman. Given that he’s now a married man with a stepson, you could posit that he has “grown up” — but listening to PRUDE, that would probably be too reductive a conclusion.
The day after the show, I meet Kindlon on a coffee shop patio not far from Salty’s, where he immediately subverts my expectations by expressing sympathy for Katy Perry, who that week had spectacularly bombed with her new single “Woman’s World.” I would have thought a 40-something punk who regularly disparages celebrity culture (he has a seething vitriol for the Met Gala) would revel in a pop star’s decline, but it turns out, he doesn’t. While I don’t have any direct quotes from Kindlon about Ms. Perry — he started monologuing before I had a chance to turn my recorder on — I can say that his POV provides a delightful whiplash after watching the entire Internet pillory her for days on end.
Once the recorder is on, I ask Kindlon about what he said about “no drops” the night before, noting that everyone in the pit seemed preternaturally polite. (There was even an eight-year-old in giant headphones sailing through the crowd at one point.) He shrugs off the idea that he’s paternal in any sense, but then goes right ahead and says something fatherly — albeit kind of gross.
“I joke on stage about it being a liability issue,” Kindlon says, folding his tattooed forearms on the picnic table. “But the reality is, I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. For someone whose body is very small, I try to keep it as safe as possible. You know, you can’t put a condom on small-room guitar music, yeah? But you don’t — to complete the ugly metaphor — want to knowingly be with the infected penis.”
Kindlon currently lives in Australia with his wife and stepson, but for the last few months leading up to this press cycle, he’s been bouncing between his brother’s place in Los Angeles, his parents’ house in Albany, and Austin, Texas, where he made some cash building a chicken coop for a pal who fled there during the pandemic to avoid vaccine mandates. In between all that, he’s been recording music and dreading the press cycle. Despite the fact that he’s been in bands pretty much forever, Kindlon approaches the work extremely casually.
“They record the song, then I just put on headphones, listen two or three times, and then I write those lyrics,” he says. “And that’s not because I’m a genius; I can only really work if I know we’re losing money. I just have to have pressure.”
Luckily, he has an ace band at his back: guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha, drummer Chris Villeneuve, and bassist Patrick Wynne. Because as Kindlon himself will tell you, he is not the least bit musical. “That’s probably evident from how I sing,” he says. “I’m never going to give a recommendation on how a riff could be better, because my suggestions will literally be saying, ‘Hey, I need a little bit more chunk in that.’ And what does that mean? I’ll be like, ‘It’s got to be a little more glide into the chunk.’ So, no help for anyone, right? Everybody’s got their job. Strong fences make good neighbors.”
Kindlon’s bête noire has always been the hysterically moralizing online mob and the hypocrisy therein — see the band’s 2018 standout track “Unlicensed Hall Monitor” — but on PRUDE, he digs more into everyday folks and their foibles. See “Business Ethics,” which is based on a real-life friend of his who Kindlon says faked his own kidnapping to get money for drugs. “For a guy that never messes with drugs, I’m very sympathetic to people who find themselves deeper in on a thing than they anticipated,” Kindlon says. “People like to have a good time, get high, and then they wake up two years later and their wife left them and they’re living in a flophouse or whatever. I’m very sympathetic to things just going a little out of control for you.”
And then there’s “Hey Listen,” in which he ruminates on the fate of a kid in a “Missing” poster at a rural Walmart. “I stare at those missing kid things, at the truck stops, at the grocery stores and everything. I get very sad,” he says. “It made me sad before I was a stepfather, but it makes me particularly sad now because I had a really good childhood. There was no reason to doubt that my parents loved me completely. This is why I feel very strongly that that sort of musician hubris is so fucking stupid, because you could have just as easily been one of these fucking kids.”
That’s probably why Drug Church’s music is so appealing to its ardent fans: because Kindlon gets it. We can all relate to the poor guy in their 2018 track “Weed Pin,” a crowd favorite about a stoner who, on the first day of his job at a lab, sticks his finger in a Petri dish, gets fired, and fantasizes about burning the whole place to the ground. Or the 2022 rager “Detective Lieutenant,” which nods to the whole art versus the artist debate in the chorus: “We don’t toss away what we love.” We can all relate to messing up (and being blamed for issues above our paygrade) — and we can all relate to the internal battle that rages in our hearts after someone we admire fucks up.
Despite all these trenchant insights into the human psyche, Kindlon seems like he’d he rather be anywhere but the spotlight. He recently wrote a screenplay about a Paris Hilton-esque character who summons a dark spirit that gives her the fame she craves, but at a cost: If she’s not constantly in someone’s eyeline, she’s toast.
“The irony of me being a 500-cap band guy worrying about being dehumanized when I should be grateful anybody knows I’m alive is not lost on me,” he says, laughing. “I just mean to say that there’s something inherently scary about being known.”
Two hours into a three-hour conversation, he drops a rough, if sweet, declaration. “I hope nobody talks about my music when I die,” he says. “I hope that it’s just my family and people that were close to me saying: He wasn’t a perfect dude, but he did his very best. He loved us very much.”
I bet the kid on the curb could relate.
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