Matt Wallock on April 13th, 2022

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Former Priests singer Katie Alice Greer last week announced her debut solo album “Barbarism” — out June 24 via FourFour Records — with the pummeling, chaotic lead single “FITS/My Love Can’t Be.” The Los Angeles-based singer and producer crafted the song a few months into the pandemic after a period of isolation.

“I’d spent something like 70 days mostly alone since the pandemic started. Then one weekend I biked out to Fairfax Avenue and found myself amongst thousands of people,” she says. “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 its 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.”

On “FITS/My Love Can’t Be,” Greer captures that overwhelmed/overjoyed quality through cacophonous, glitchy production. But her gleeful vocals cut through the noise: “When I hear people in the street I know they’re / just like me / searching for a universe in strange words / a stranger speaks,” she sings.

An accompanying video shows Greer hosting a news program that experiences serious technical difficulties. “I’m not a journalist, but maybe to underscore the contrast between a reporter and a storyteller, I wanted to make a ‘Network’ Howard Beale-inspired music video to visually communicate the cacophony of feeling,” she says of the visual.

“Barbarism” comes after Greer’s 2020 EP “No One Else On Earth.” The Sister Polygon co-founder wrote, produced and mixed the album entirely herself.

||| Watch: The video for “FITS/My Love Can’t Be”