Petrol Girls consistently release class music with important messages and here at AltCorner we can’t get enough of them.
Preachers is yet another class track!
“Lyrically, ‘Preachers’ is my way of kicking back at this preachy, saintly, holier-than-thou vibe you get sometimes in radical left communities,” says vocalist Ren Aldridge. “I get very frustrated by the lack of nuance sometimes, and the way people seem so much more interested in punishing individuals than building resilient communities of care. And I hate the way that women and marginalised genders are held to such a way higher standard than cis-men.
I’m absolutely not saying that we shouldn’t criticise each other or that we should let things like sexual violence slide. But I think we have a lot of questions to ask ourselves collectively in terms of how we deal with harm, conflict, and abuse, and differentiate between them. I’ve been learning so much about transformative justice, which is where abolitionist politics and activism against gender based violence really come together, and was very inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s book ‘We Will Not Cancel Us.’
I also just really needed to reject this pressure to always act and speak completely perfectly, which has had a severe impact on my mental health by putting me in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and piling up alongside other pressures to make me mentally collapse. For me, our new album is so much about recovering from that severe depressive episode, and a crucial part of that was saying fuck it, I will never do enough, I will always make mistakes, but as long as I am true to my values and reflective thats fucking fine.”