“Strawberry is a weird kid of a record – a bit simple, stuck in an in-between size, and with some mood swings. It’s not sure why it’s here, and it’s pissed about it.” That’s how Prayer Group describe their new 10” MLP, out this Friday on Reptilian Records. The words cut close to the core of what this release is about: frustration, uncertainty, and the tension of being caught between states.
Formed around 2014 from members of equestrians, kingshead, gifts from enola and other Richmond outfits, Prayer Group have long walked the unstable line between noise rock and punk without caring which side they lean toward. Over the past decade they’ve released three EPs and one LP, destroyed vans and speakers across the East Coast, and shared stages with usa nails, ken mode, multicult, and child bite.
Their latest work arrives after lineup shifts, relocations, day jobs, and changing family lives—circumstances that left the record both rushed at the start and dragged at the finish.
The result is Strawberry: a document of songs written in different times and mental states, some fresh, some simmering for years, some still mutating while being recorded. It begins direct and raw, drifts into moodier stretches, then rips back to blunt force by the close. Its shorter runtime pushed it into the odd 10” format, yet it carries the weight of a full LP.
Tracked with Ricky Olson at The Ward (with ties to enforced, prisoner, bleach everything), finished by guitarist Nate Dominy at Room 2B, and mixed by Chris Compton (hold tight!, sea of storms, basmati), the record was mastered by Brad Boatwright at Audiosiege (Deadguy, Full Of Hell, Nø Man). The unsettling cover—a child’s body with a berry-headed face that isn’t a strawberry—was handled by Luke LaMarca, matching the music’s skronk and mood swings.
Lyrically and musically, Strawberry is about collapse and correction.
It lurches between dumb-heavy fuzz riffs and unexpectedly intricate sections, slipping from straightforward punk blasts into bent, moody detours. A Heaven’s Gate sample closes one track, radio bleed seeps into another, and layered parts stretch songs beyond what could ever be written live. Together, these pieces reflect a band wrestling with disarray but refusing to polish it away.
The full track-by-track commentary—covering the stumbling beginnings of “Plagiarism,” the long-simmering weight of “Variance,” the dumb-heavy drive of the title track, the homage of “Pig,” the bleak sampling of “Concern,” the revived riff of “PR Nightmare,” and the chaotic closer “Meatgrinder”—lays bare how fractured writing processes and accidents shaped this release. Each song is a mark of the disorder behind the band’s last few years.
Strawberry comes out August 29th on 10” vinyl and digital. Prayer Group will mark its release with shows in Philadelphia (Aug 28, Thunderbird Hall), Baltimore (Aug 29, Holy Frijoles), and Richmond (Aug 30, Banditos), with more dates in the works.
The full commentary can be read below.
Plagiarism
– This started as a drum pattern, which led to a weird bass riff. The guitars on top of that initial part didn’t get figured out until real late, and now it requires some sampling to pull off live because we ended up with a layered part that I would’ve never come up with in a live context. After working through a weird start we just decided to go for a big change and not overthink it in the second half of the song, and somehow it got us back to one of the earlier riffs to close it out. It’s nice when that works out.
Variance
– I think this is the oldest song on the record. It started a long time ago with our previous bass player and most of the first half didn’t change, but we decided to take a big turn into the moodier part at the end at some point. I don’t know how we got there, but once we decided to go with that bendy chord thing, the rest came together even though we haven’t played anything like that before, and eventually that became a bit of a turning point on the record as a whole.
Strawberry
– This also started a long time ago, but Carl made it his own and now I can’t really remember how it originally came to be. We just wanted something dumb heavy with big fuzz riffs, but then we also wound up with these little mathy parts, a really extended bass intro, and some synth samples- funny how that works out. When we tried it after the noise after Variance, the shape of the record started to come together. For pedal nerds, the noise break towards the end is made with a Malekko Charlie Foxtrot.
Pig
– This is basically a tribute to one of our favorite bands that we tracked entirely in our space because this slower chunk of the record felt like it was missing something, which turned out to be more big dumb fuzz riffs. Pedal nerds, the noise/feedback thing is a Mid-Fi Clari-Not (fuzz) on bass.
Concern
– This is definitely the youngest track on the record and one that also came together after tracking drums. It’s been slowly growing on us for a while, but now it’s a solid live track for us. There’s more synth samples and big fuzz riffs, but this one’s straightforward in its own way. The sample at the end is from Heaven’s Gate, and I don’t remember how I wound up listening to it, but it’s just so bleak and fucked up that I got kind of stuck on those recordings for a bit and this wound up here.
PR Nightmare
– Ok I lied- this might actually be the oldest song on the record. This one started as a sloppy punk demo with MIDI drums and an amp sim, which we usually never use for PG, but the original riff didn’t sit right with everyone for years. As the record was coming together, I must have been going through my harddrive and thought it could fit with these other tracks, because I brought it up again and someone recommended one tweak to the riff and then everything else fell into place. After a couple moodier tracks, we felt like we needed to course correct and play some punk riffs, and the contrast between Concern and this one felt pretty funny.
Meatgrinder
– This started out as a joke riff on another (I think) joke riff from a garage band that we really love, but then it kind of grew legs and became a real song. Like with Plagiarism, there was a lot of not overthinking it here for most of the track, but we wound up really in the weeds with this weirdly intricate dissonant variation to end the track on. We did some bass takes with multiple different amps cranked just to get crazier feedback for this part, so you can hear some of the weird radio signals that bleed through our amps in our practice space at the very end. It wound up feeling like the right closer for the whole record- just simple and ugly and chaotic.
