Over the years, Priests leader Katie Alice Greer has released solo material — including two EPs and covers of the Rolling Stones, TV On The Radio, and Bobbie Gentry. Now, she’s returning with her solo debut. (A press release also describes her as “ex-Priests,” which seems a bit more official than whatever grey area hiatus the band were on.) It’s called Barbarism, and it’s out in June.

Along with the announcement, Greer has shared a lead single called “FITS/My Love Can’t Be.” The genesis of the song goes back to May 2020, in the mixture of pandemic isolation and protests. Here’s what Greer had to say about it:

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. 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.

The track comes with a video with Greer playing correspondents on the “Barbarism News Network.” “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,” Greer said in a statement. Check it out below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “FITS/My Love Can’t Be”
02 “Talking In My Sleep (Intro)”
03 “Fake Nostalgia”
04 “Dreamt I Talk To Horses”
05 “Flag Wave Pt. 1”
06 “Flag Wave Pt. 2”
07 “Captivated”
08 “No Man”
09 “A Semi Or A Freight Train”
10 “How Do I Know (PRING 5)”
11 “Barbarism”

Barbarism is out 6/24 on FourFour Records.