Do not listen to Tendencies, the new album by Middle Sattre, while you’re driving. This tenderly crafted and delicate album dives unflinchingly into queer shame. I did not grow up a Mormon like frontman Hunter Prueger (who told us about the album in our recent interview), but I had my fair share of explicit and implicit disapproval of my behaviors growing up. Listening to Tendencies brought up memories I had forgotten; not necessarily painful memories, but a re-surfacing of the crystallization of hostility visibly LGBTQ+ often find themselves facing.
Tendencies moves in chronological order, a tour through an agonizing, repressive youth whose only reprieve is we know that, eventually, the narrator comes out and finds community. Preuger relates these memories with a hushed voice while the band swirls around him with music that is understated and organic, like spirits breathing and pulsing through Preuger’s being.
Some of these vignettes pack a particular punch: “Sweet 16” finds Preuger lonely and loathing as he spends time with a friend’s gay father. Even “Imperfect Hands,” about the narrator’s first love, are filled with longing and regret. Middle Sattre’s gaze shifts to the macro in the latter half of the album, with “Stop Speaking” a jeremiad against preachers, and “Pornography” an indictment of the church’s sexual hypocrisy.
Middle Sattre softens the blow with their gentle, spacious folk. Yet the serene acceptance of these violations almost makes Preuger’s soft-spoken performance all the more intense. Even if your experience struggling in the closet is not tinged with religious trauma, Tendencies allows us to access the pain, confront it, and then be comforted.