“The good was good, but the bad was better! And that pretty much sums up everything!”
Full of renewed vigour and brimming with emotional volatility, Toronto punk outfit PUP (standing for Pathetic Use of Potential, for those who didn’t know) release their fifth LP, Who Will Look After the Dogs?. Acting as a chronological, cathartic unpacking of frontman Stefan Babcock’s life to date, Who Will Look After The Dogs? is longer, more reflective, and more serious than their previous albums. For a band that frequently deals so often in satirical cliches and dark humor, their latest release feels heavier, but without abandoning the hyper-aggressive, upbeat post-hardcore sound they’re known for, complete with sharp hooks, strong lyricism, and classic PUP anthems.
With PUP’s ethos having been so rooted in the concept of misery-loves-company, Babcock faced a dilemma when he found himself alone- what happens when the company disappears? After ending a decade-long relationship, he found himself feeling isolated. As other members of the band were kept busy celebrating transcendent milestones in their lives (Guitarist Steve Sladkowski got married, bassist Nestor Chumak settled into being a dad, and drummer Zack Mykula moved to a new place in Toronto) Babcock felt himself spending more time alone.
With no one left to aid in perpetuating or rehashing his pain, he was forced to sit with it by himself. Misery in solitude becomes its own kind of echo chamber; with no one to shout back, the noise eventually dissolves into cathartic reflection. At some point, you loop around your unhappiness so many times that you begin to retrace your steps. And once you’ve worn a path through the same pain over and over, the only thing left to do is go back to the beginning and chart the territory, take stock, and trace the wreckage. Which is exactly what he did.
Babcock viewed the sequence of tracks as a chronology; the first songs being written from the perspective of his naive, youthful self, the middle third from his frequent bouts of self-loathing, and the end of the album from a place of acceptance and moving on. “There’s a lot of sadness in the back half of the record, but there’s a lot more hope here too,” says Babcock. “I’m just coming to peace with who I am.” Fueled by the raw energy of grand-scale disappointment, he funneled the discomfort of isolation directly into music. In just one year, Babcock wrote 30 songs for Who Will Look After the Dogs?. What previously took 6-7 weeks now took them less than 3, and in that time, they were able to record the entirety of the album.
The emotional urgency carries straight through to the sound of the record, right from the beginning. “No Hope” opens the album with an immediate bumpy, heavy turbulence, and escalating electric guitar riffs that dance around the song of their own accord. The transition between the static closing of the first track and the opening of the next feels like a missed opportunity and a stutter in momentum. The chaos of these stutters, however, doesn’t feel strange or out of place, and the frequent pinballing between genres and sounds reflects the absurdity in the process of processing. Which is what this album’s focus seems to be.
“Concrete” stands as a quintessential PUP track, packed with strong hooks and dangling guitar chords, throwing in a nod to the nu-metal staple, Disturbed. Leaning into a heavier, more 90s-inspired classic punk rock sound, the collaboration with Jeff Rosenstock’s ‘Get Dumber’ scratches all the right places. Claiming their emo roots in the quieter beginning of ‘Hunger For Death’, Babcock sings, “I wanna know what’s in store when the hunger for death comes tearing down your door.”
“The good was good, but the bad was better!”, “Paranoid” is an especially noteworthy song on the album, a desperately cathartic, head-banging feast of a track. Babcock shouts amid sludgy, jagged guitar, “I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,”. Just as the song seems to descend into dusk, it erupts in possibly one of their best breakdowns to date, as the melody and spine of the song come apart at the seams. Matching the energy of obsessive thinking as it hiccups and comes back to itself, the track spins off into a sonic embodiment of all the previous motifs being thrown into a blender and scraping together in the rhythm of obsessive thought.
We reach the album’s title in “Hallways”, which finds Babcock screaming, “I’m losing the will to keep dragging on, but I can’t die yet ‘cause who will look after the dog,”. In classic PUP style, the track cloaks hopeless ruminations in an upbeat punk energy. Matching the emotional urgency of their 2016 hit ‘Sleep in the Heat’, ‘Hallways’ throws its hands in the air with a surrender that would be liberating if it weren’t so dark.
The penultimate track, “Best Revenge” offers a classic anthemic shout-along, spitting out a perfectly bitter one-liner that sums up the albums core thesis of reaching for healing while stuck in a cycle of self-inflicted damage, “The best revenge is living well, I’ve been living like shit”. The outro rivals ‘Paranoid’ in impact, with an interlude of distorted guitar shredding followed by reverbed vocals and scattered xylophone.
The closer of the album channels the likes of Sum41, Weezer, and Joyce Manor, opening with descending guitar overlaying melodic vocals. Feeling both triumphant, resigned, and bittersweet, it’s hard to tell if the ending of the album is hopeful or not. ‘Shut Up’ feels like exit music to a coming-of-age indie film with an ambivalent ending; a sigh after all the shouting. The last track ends everything with a stark abruptness, leaving your head reeling and eager to hop on again to have another go.
Possibly their most thematically hard-hitting album to date, Who Will Look After The Dog? maintains the band’s long-standing tradition of channeling self-hatred and destruction through sardonic, misanthropic lyricism, and altogether punching away at the meaty lump of depression with desperate, rhythmic catharsis until it transforms into something subdued and self-aware.
Where their last album detoured into an irreverent and experimental concept album, Who Will Look After the Dogs? makes a return to PUP’s signature sound, but not without some reshuffling in terms of changes in pace and tone. Less breakneck and more introspective, the album bounces around unpredictably in its rhythm and energy, which, if anything, makes it all the more compelling.
Rawer and less refined than previous albums, WWLATD is rife with vulnerability, exposing brutal truths about relationships, self-worth and mental health that come with the territory of merciless introspection. With hard-hitting lines like “The good was bad but the bad was better!” and “Why bother with God when he doesn’t bother with you?”, paired with anarchic riffs and chanting melodies, PUP’s latest album delivers a treasure trove of head-bobbing catharsis. Who Will Look After the Dogs is messy, brutal, and also strangely comforting; it’s an album that doesn’t clean up after itself and doesn’t need to.
Pre-Order Who Will Take Care of the Dogs? HERE
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
