In Conversation: Patrick Kindlon of Drug Church
He is widely recognized as one of hardcore's most cutting and provocative figures. But there is compassion in Patrick Kindlon's critiques.
Almost every interview I've ever done tends to feature a few tangents or asides that are mostly too irrelevant to publish—and that’s to be expected. These things go where they want to go. But during the course of my conversation with Drug Church singer Patrick Kindlon, we made a conscious decision to completely derail ourselves for at least 45 of the 120 minutes we spent together. That’s not typical. None of those digressions made much sense to publish; the bulk of it, honestly, was him asking me questions. But the spirit of our diversions told me everything I needed to know about a person who has been called, at multiple turns, difficult, contrarian, and even controversial. They showed me a Pat Kindlon who is curious, compassionate, and although certainly eager to play devil’s advocate, still quite willing and happy to be wrong. And lucky for all of us, whenever we returned to go back “on the record,” that spirit followed. Pat really is, as he playfully attests, “thought-filled.”
Drug Church’s fifth album, Prude, comes out on October 4. It’s as straightforward and as pummeling as you’d expect—there is no major musical reinvention here. But if you ride along with Pat’s lyrics, you’ll notice that in between his now-trademark sardonic humor and somewhat cynical takes, that same instinct for compassion finds its way to the center more often than on previous records. “Maybe that’s the result of something deeper,” Pat suggests, calling the shift in tone inadvertent at best. “Like, I have a stepson now. Maybe some of my concerns are different. Maybe my testosterone is down. How would I know? We can leave it to the Lit professors to figure out why this period of Drug Church is more sensitive.”
I feel like Drug Church often gets pegged as a band that sort of exists in this liminal space: Difficult to pin down, difficult to categorize. “Hardcore-adjacent,” even. But do you really feel like what you’re doing is all that ambiguous?
PAT: No. But you know, one thing made a really intense impression on me when I was a kid—which is that people arguing for their status in a thing always diminishes them. So when you saw Billie Joe [Armstrong] from Green Day feel really obligated to defend how punk he was, that sort of pulls the strings in your mind that makes you go, “Maybe it’s not that fucking punk” [laughs]. I never wanted to find myself in that position, where I kind of embarrass myself looking like I have something to defend. Not to sound too galaxy-brain here, but I enjoy what I do. And because I enjoy what I do, it’s immaterial what anyone else calls it.
People don’t like to hear this, but personally, as I’ve gotten older, as far as genres go, my definition of things has actually narrowed quite a bit—not expanded. It’s going the other way. And I also think that’s OK. The thing that maybe a 20-year-old can’t understand is that if somebody says you’re not a hardcore band, you can feel weirdly defensive about it, but you can still love hardcore music quite a bit and not play it! There’s a great number of things that you do all day that don’t involve hardcore. Like, if you’re making vegan lasagna, you don’t feel the need to say, “This is a hardcore vegan lasagna!” [laughs]
From what I can gather, you came into hardcore in the ‘90s in Albany.
PAT: Yeah.
Albany has kind of a rich history of hardcore, but at the same time, it feels like it’s always been a bit “New York-adjacent” [laughs]. When you were first taking it in, did you ever feel a kind of second-city status?
PAT: Not really, because when you’re a kid, what’s happening in front of you is bigger than life. And also, prior to YouTube, it wasn’t like I could watch shows from everywhere else and compare everything. I think that for the kids that were going to the shows that I was going to—which was more like One King Down or Stigmata—our locals were real. They were significant. We cared about them. I don’t think we saw ourselves in the shadow of anything else. There were also periods where Albany was really healthy. Touring bands had great, great shows there.
In terms of your growing up there, you had the very atypical hardcore experience of feeling loved and supported by your family [laughs].
PAT: Yeah, I did. Not to get maudlin or very deep with you, Norm, but my father is very old now. So I think about what I will probably be obliged to speak on at his funeral. And I’m just going to say that I don’t know if the man understood me at all, but he was just so supportive—and that’s the best you can hope for. My mother is the same deal. They’re just supportive people. I feel very loved by my parents. So any draw to punk, or what used to be called an “alternative lifestyle,” that’s purely just because there’s something wrong with me, you know what I mean? It’s got nothing to do with a bad home life. I think it was just the most appealing vehicle to express myself because it had the lowest barrier of entry. That was the appeal of punk and hardcore music for me—that the thing you find yourself really engaged with and having a good time with says, “All you need is a 40 dollar guitar” [laughs].
But your first real creative love was comics.
PAT: Yes. I didn’t come from a musical family. I didn’t have much exposure to music at all until I started going to the public library when I was twelve. I just took out anything with cool album art. But from the time I was two, I was exposed to comic books. There were seven of us [kids] total, but in my immediate family there were four. My father worked during the day and my mother was a homemaker. Any parent will tell you that you need to take your children on a lot of walks—because it’s the cheapest means of entertaining a child! We would go virtually every day to this small plaza behind our house where there was a pharmacy. So from the time I was a very young child, my mother would buy me what was probably a 75 cent comic book—or less. From the time I was unable to read to the time that I became literate, I was exposed to comic books. It was the first thing that I fully involved myself in that you could say that I loved.
What type of storytelling were you most attracted to at that age?
PAT: It’s a good question. For myself, what I now see as a failing in comic books in North America, is that young people want something that is slightly above their age range, right? They don’t want something that’s catered to them. They want something more reaching. So I really liked material like The Punisher and work like that when I was six because it felt more mature; even though it’s silly on some level, it’s still more mature than what a child should be exposed to. I loved Spider-Man and I loved Groo, too, but I always reached for the material, even in those books, that made me feel a bit more sophisticated than I was—or a little edgy.
I think about comic books a lot because when I was young, my number one was Wonder Woman.
PAT: No shit?
I was obsessed with Wonder Woman. I wanted to be Wonder Woman. I would run around my house and spin in circles and wear those bracelets. And now, as an adult, I realize that her story resonated with me in unique ways: For one, my hero was a woman. Most boys my age, their heroes were Batman or Superman or Spider-Man. Lots of men. But I valued her qualities as a woman. The other aspect of it, which is a little more broad, is the secret identity part. Combining those two things, it’s easy to see that I understood my queerness even as a kid. I had this secret identity that nobody knew, but I knew was special, and seeing a woman with a secret identity wielding that kind of strength was empowering for me.
PAT: For me, the most relatable [superhero] was definitely Spider-Man. Famously, the appeal of Spider-Man is that he’s just a kid… Correct me if I’m wrong, Norman, because I don’t know how you identify spiritually, but that’s been an interest of yours at least at some point in your life—is that right?
Yes.
PAT: I grew up going to Catholic school. My family was not particularly religious; my mother’s not even Catholic. But we went to Catholic school. And the thing I liked about that lazy Catholicism that many Latin Mass Catholics don’t like is this idea that you just try your best, right? That makes sense to me. My brain is totally incapable of thinking about how to apply religion to my own life, but the thing I do like about lapsed Catholicism is the idea that you just try to do more good than bad. Just do your best. And Spider-Man was one of those [superheroes] for me, where the constant through-line in his character is that he’s trying his best and sometimes he fails in that. It was still meant for children at the time, so it wasn’t like he meant to be a good boyfriend, but in fact, he was running around with three other girls [laughs]. They never got into that. He just set out to be as responsible and as good a hero as he could that day when he put on his mask, but he couldn’t save everybody. So maybe that’s the power of longform storytelling: Whether you like it or not, the hero is always forgiven because he’s the protagonist in each issue.
You studied religion in college.
PAT: I was taking a lot of Literature classes and I was taking Religion classes as electives. [Pat ultimately graduated with a degree in Religious Studies.—ed.]
What took you in that direction?
PAT: It was somewhat unintentional. I was receiving a lot of pressure from my mother, who was a big believer in education, to go back to school. And I kept saying, “How are we supposed to afford that?” But then I got into a school where, if you’re over a certain age, you can just matriculate into their normal classes at a Continuing Education rate. So I was able to do that. But the thing is… I guess the way to put it would be that a lot of the problems that I have with the broader culture at this exact moment are problems I experienced very acutely in a classroom the decade before. Which is to say that I, as an adult, don’t need to be moralized by anything I read. I think polemics are just gross. Some of them are kind of interesting, but that’s all they can ever be. It’s all just really for a type of gross audience—a person who consumes art not to have the experiential moment with it, but to contextualize it. There’s this thirst to contextualize it, which is just fucking revolting. It’s like art through the lens of an engineer, where there is this thing that you can’t make sense of and you’re not supposed to try, but instead, you’re digging through the possibilities of meanings. You start digging through the life of the creator of the thing. You’re seeking context where there might be none.
Artists and creative people’s lives interest me. The reasons that something might have arrived on paper or in music or on film is interesting. But I think it’s fucking disgusting to presume you actually know. It belittles the art and it denigrates the person who says it. To take on a personal meaning from a work is a beautiful thing. But to decide that you know, without question, and to be so goddamned wrong is annoying.
Not-knowing is untenable for so many people.
PAT: It makes you annoying, right? Like, OK. This is a delicate one. But whenever I see the younger people involved in hardcore music taking shots at the old New York guys, in particular, I get very in my feelings. That is not because these are my friends. It’s not like I’m Mr. New York Hardcore. But I get so upset when I see younger people attack some of these “icons” or whatever you call them because I think there’s a subtext to a lot of these men’s lives that remain subtext. To me, it’s not very hard to dig just below the surface and say, “OK, look. There’s a thing that this fellow doesn’t want to talk about. A lot of his peers crashed out on drugs or otherwise found a means to kill themselves. And this fella didn’t.” So I think instead of shitting on him, we can just take him as a whole and say, “Perhaps there’s some damage that this fella is working through that you couldn’t know much about—hopefully.” That doesn’t require putting him through “a 2024 lens.” It doesn’t require putting him through a colander or trying to make him approved by your standards.
So apologies for taking a very long way to get to this place, but that was my problem with a lot of my contemporaries in the Literature program. I found in my literature courses—and sometimes now in my larger life—that the first read people have on a thing is minimizing and stupid and done exclusively for their own benefit [laughs]. It is not to look at the thing with clear eyes.
A lot of people really tried to read your first musical output—End of A Year, early Self-Defense Family—through “the D.C. lens.”
PAT: Well, it’s not like we helped ourselves with that one—with the name of the band or recording with Don Zientara [laughs].
What attracted you to D.C.?
PAT: It was probably my body type. I was a skinny little dude. You know, D.C. at a certain time a few years after I started going to shows was like… People would go to shows there and be like, “Oh, so-and-so’s gun dropped out of their sweatpants again” [laughs] Albany was not like that. But Albany did have a machismo to the shows I was going to; there was a “New York-adjacent” sort of masculinity thing going on. And I’m not really built for all that. So that era of D.C. spoke to the small-guy energy in me. I would never presume that I’m “intelligent,” but I am thought-filled. Not thoughtful—my wife will tell you that—but thought-filled. That’s how the D.C. stuff always read to me, that it was people with a lot of thoughts per day. They had a high TPD. At the same time, I don’t want to call them “thinkers.” Like, I love the Embrace record, but it’s [full of] profoundly stupid sentiments. It’s almost like a primary color painting.
Right, I get that, but also I think there’s a problem with the way records in our community get calcified over time. We sort of forget that most of our “classic” records were made by extremely young kids. Like, I still love Break Down The Walls, but also Ray [Cappo] was nineteen or something when he made that.
PAT: I have a very personal project where I’m listening to all of the Minor Threat bootlegs, all the live shows that have been collected over time—and just so Ian [MacKaye] and everyone else understands, this is not an effort to harm anybody—but it’s for my own personal, personal joy to hear him at nineteen say the most offensive things that anybody could say at a given show. It’s so funny. It thrills me in this weird way. He says shit that’s beyond The Meatmen at some of these shows, you know what I mean? And that's the thing: He doesn’t require my forgiveness. I could give a goddamn. But frankly, if anybody ever got mad at him [for saying any of these things], I would point out that he was, what, eighteen years old? Nineteen? Twenty?
This is not a world-changing idea here, and it’s a constant conversation—particularly in prisoner reform and spiritual spaces—but at what point are you no longer punishing the man in front of you? The man in front of you is not the man you’re punishing. If I was a heinous little weird online goblin who was trying to collect oppo research on people like Ian MacKaye, what would that exercise be exactly? He’s a different human. He’s been five human beings since the time of the thing he said that might offend somebody in 2024. Like, how in God’s name could you hold somebody to that?
People don’t like this about me, but you get pretty much a year—that’s how long I can hold anger for other people. I can be sore from it, but I’m pretty much out from under it after that because I assume that you are different than you were when you did or said the stupid thing that hurt me. Not everybody likes that about me. People want you to hang onto anger your whole life because they think it puts a moral point on something, but I forget as much as I can after a year.
That feels like what you are essentially getting at in a song like “Peer Review.”
PAT: Yeah. I mean, I’m going to have to be honest. People have been riding me the last couple of years that I sing about the same fucking three topics. They are correct. Guilty as charged. But yes, that’s literally what it’s about.
I mean, look. That one actually comes from my father, who was incarcerated for a number of years. He goes through this laundry list of things that convicts complain about—and for good reason, it sucks to be incarcerated—but they’re often things that you or I could easily understand, like a lack of freedom or movement. In my father’s understanding of things, that means his inability to go make himself a turkey sandwich, right? There’s also a general dehumanization that goes along with being on another person’s schedule—even though my father did very well in the Army, and those skills kind of translated. But the one thing he would often complain about is just that there was a lack of intelligent conversation. Now, my father is no Rhodes Scholar! But he has a high IQ. No education, but a high IQ. Not all of his cellmates shared that, so he would find it frustrating on occasion. But whenever he complained about this, he would then—almost every time—have a moment of self-awareness about it and say, “But hey, I’m right here with them. What can I say?”
It’s actually kind of an optimistic song for a record that—and tell me if this hits or doesn’t hit—feels a little less skeptical than other Drug Church records.
PAT: Correct. But I’ve been made to reflect on this a little bit lately because the press release bullshit for the record makes note of songs like “Hey Listen,” where there is no cynicism in them. They seem like straight reads. To me, I thought that I was just affected by something that I saw that day when I heard the song and wrote the lyrics to it—just as I’ve done for everything. Maybe it was too serious a subject matter that I just didn’t have the writing ability to give it the same kind of cynicism that people maybe detect in some of my other songs, but also, maybe I can’t make a song about missing children sardonic, you know what I mean? [laughs] This is possible; I’m probably not that good of a writer.
But also, maybe that was the result of something deeper. Like, I have a stepson now. Maybe some of my concerns are different. And as you get older, as you get closer to death, people who are closer to birth seem young to you, even if they’re not. There are guys who could have done three tours overseas—three tours in war—and they still seem young to me because I’m getting so much older. I would be the last to know if that’s a stage of life, what I’m going through. Maybe my testosterone is down. How would I know? We can leave it to the Lit professors to figure out why this period of Drug Church is more sensitive.
When “Demolition Man” came out, I wrote about it in AM Radio because I felt like there was this really interesting desirous truth in it. That line: “Picture being built for one thing, and when that thing is done, you feel free.” It really struck me because I feel like we live in a culture right now that really promotes the idea that we are only built for one thing.
PAT: Right.
Think of every reality competition show you’ve ever seen. It’s like, “I was born to be a chef!” Or, “Singing is my destiny!” We try to find the one thing that makes us feel whole and we hold onto it for dear life. So I guess my question to you is, while you were putting this song together and you’re thinking about that idea, did you actually believe that this idea is real for us?
PAT: That’s very interesting because now I’m holding two competing thoughts in my own mind. I’m the guy who really feels that identifying as a musician is ultimately a pitiful thing. You might be inclined to do it. You might fill it out on your tax forms, or if you’re at a dinner party, maybe it’s the quickest way out of a conversation. But I think you need to identify more strongly with your relationships to the people you love. Obviously, that's not an easy thing to say as an answer to a question, but insofar as you see yourself, it’s like: Are you a good husband? Are you a good father? These things seem less diminishing to me than saying, “I’m a musician.”
At the same time, I think that in this moment, so many people feel trapped in this sort of service industry, post-industrial economy space, where you don’t see the results of your labor at all. Not the fruits of your labor—that would be money—but the results. You don’t get to see anything to completion. It’s somebody talking to you about how you “met all your quotas for this financial quarter.” But what are you supposed to do with that? Have cake or something? Are you supposed to celebrate that in some way? You don’t get to hold the thing you did.
When I was working in the print shop at Equal Vision Records, there was a band at the time on the label that had a lot of buzz—or at least in my mind, they did. Who knows. But they abruptly stopped playing. And I found out it was because the singer had gotten his partner or someone pregnant and he decided to put music away and be a father. At whatever age I was at that time, that was inconceivable to me. It was a completely far out concept. Even up until a couple of years ago, I think I probably saw the world through that lens, where I thought: There’s a thing that I’m trying to accomplish here. I want to be good at this thing that I do. I want to express everything that I have inside myself. I want to get it done. And it’s only within the last few years that I’ve come to understand that—not to be biblical—but that’s just vanity.
It’s a weird thing to say about a child, but I understand why some people see their child as being their only meaningful accomplishment. Because a child is tactile. A child exists in three dimensions. Every day you see what your labor has manifested, and hopefully that is a healthy and happy human being. Not to disrespect what you or I do here, but what do we do? You know what I mean? We create moments for people who often turn on us or tell us later that they’ve decided they never liked this thing to begin with. You know what I mean? It was just a phase of their lives. It’s ephemera, in whatever way. I have a great-grandfather who worked at a biscuit factory for his entire life as an adult. From the time he was able to work until they put him into the ground, he missed one day of work. That seems insane and stupid to me, but he also had three children—and in that capacity, he accomplished so much more than so many fucking jackasses in music. I don’t know. I’m getting asked questions in interviews that lead me to sounding like I’m shitting on music as a thing to do, and I don’t mean it like that. I’m just increasingly feeling like people need to understand where they stand in the world. We are all going to be consumed by the sun eventually, but what you and I do is even more transitory.
I don’t know if you have Spotify open, but I’d like to look at something right now. I really like a band called Endeavor. Do you remember them?
I do. New Jersey hardcore.
PAT: That’s right. I really love some of their music… Let’s see. Oh my god, no… 242 monthly listeners on Spotify! I think Constructive Semantics is the best record of that year. Holy shit. Hold on… How about Threadbare? Threadbare was an incredible band. 410 monthly listeners! You know what? I should fucking kill myself [laughs]. Four Walls Falling, another great one. 412! Wait, how about Ressurection?
I was in that band!
PAT: 231 monthly listeners. This is our impact on the world! So anyway, the point is that we never accomplished anything or did anything for anybody, it’s fucking stupid [laughs].
I mean, I think there’s a difference between overinflating the importance of what we do—which is maybe what’s expected of us in an interview—versus maybe completely invalidating our entire lives. There’s probably an in-between somewhere.
PAT: This is the fine line that I’m failing to walk. I watched a band whose entire persona was that they were world-beaters, and how nothing was going to stand in their way, but then they had a rough couple of years, and now as a result, I watched the promo for their most recent record and it was like [in a dejected voice], “Yeah, I don’t know, man. Check out the record, if you can.” That speaks to me. Because maybe the people in that band are having the realization that I am, which is that I am doing this thing exclusively because it expresses me. It is fundamentally no different than your grandmother sitting in the garden and painting that garden on a little easel. The only time that people are going to see her paintings are when they’re cleaning out her house when she dies. Maybe that’s all you or I have ever accomplished.
Anti-Matter is an ad-free, anti-algorithm, completely reader-supported publication. If you’ve valued reading this and care to ensure its survival, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. ✨
Patrick is one of my favorite lyricists and frontpeople in hardcore (broadly construed). He's evocative and incisive, and songs like "Unlicensed Hall Monitor" and "Detective Lieutenant" get right at the nastier end of cultural discourse, one that denies sinners their future and chains saints to their past. But I think he's selling what he does short.
I understand the frustration of not having something you can hold and call your own from your work, but...that's pretty much teaching in a nutshell. You put the information out there and hope it makes a difference. You hope that treating your students well will give them something they need to grow. But you rarely know for certain if you've been successful or not. One lesson, one phrase, one interaction, one song, one record, one show...you put something out into the world without knowing who it's going to land for and how they'll be changed by it. But if you think about all the moments (and songs, and shows, etc....) that have changed you, that's what they were. Maybe Threadbare only have 410 monthly listeners, but those 410 people are different from who they would have been if they hadn't heard them. That's not nothing.
Oh, the spotify monthly listeners...I must admit, I too check spotify monthly listeners to get a general sense of a band's current popularity, especially if I am not familiar with them. But goodness, there is so much more to a band's impact than that. There's definitely people who say, "hey, this music really impacted me," but there are also so many who hold something dear to their hearts and never express out loud what it means to them. You never know just how many people are impacted by something. That's not even accounting for bands that were pivotal in cultural movements, regardless of current popularity. I think it is totally fine if someone decides that they want to create music for the sake of expression with no thought towards a legacy, but I'm firmly on the side of music being important and valuable and having a lasting impact. Sure there will always be individuals who are like "that was my hair metal phase" or "that was my scene kid era" but look at us as subscribers to anti matter! We care! I read every one of these articles and there are definitely bands that I am not familiar with but through reading about them I am able to discover the impact they have. Not just the articles but the comments people leave too. I've now written a giant paragraph, so I should probably wrap it up, but I guess I'm just here to say that I care :)