As a cis-gender white Gen X male, it almost seems tone-deaf to be the author of a review for Lambrini Girls‘ debut album Who Let The Dogs Out. There couldn’t be a demographic that tracks more differently than Phoebe Lunny and Lily Macieira, the two 20-something members at the core of the wildly adventurous, essential punk rock duo from Brighton. Effortlessly in tune with the cultural shift that has righteously steam-rolled all the lily-white privilege that comes with hundreds of years of oppression, the music the band makes seems to come from the beating heart of revolution, and isn’t that what punk rock is all about?
Punk rock, after all, is about stirring up the rage that comes from having the Doc Martened feet of fifty-something-year old white men on your neck for decades, all while they simultaneously mansplain how things were different back when punk rock was first rearing its pock-marked head in the late ’70s. And yet I didn’t think twice when I was an anxiety-wracked teenager in the ’80s listening to the Angry Samoans sing “Homosexual” or the Dead Milkmen screaming about “Takin’ Retards to the Zoo”. As much as punk has always been about fighting against the grain, there has always been heavy doses of privilege, supremacy, and toxic masculinity buried within its two minutes of fury. And Lambrini Girls will NOT let you fucking forget it.
New album Who Let The Dogs Out comes on the heels of a relatively meteoric rise to the post-punk heap of ne’er do wells. The girls have gotten the accolades of Iggy Pop, with the punk rock legend playing their 2022 single “Help Me I’m Gay” on a Radio 6 show he hosted and inviting them to support him on tour. Their incendiary live shows are well-documented and the band seems to have been praised by everybody with a guitar and a giant axe to grind in the gloriously eclectic UK indy scene. With all this at stake, there were high expectations for the girls’ first record.
A lot of these expectations were fueled by the songs the band released over the course of 2024. The record’s first single “God’s Country” ripped the meticulously set dining table of the United Kingdom to absolute shreds. If there’s going to be any kind of systemic change in the Western world, there’s going to be a lot of broken dishes, and Lambrini Girls seem dead-set on destruction. “God’s Country” sees the girls railing against the dog-eat-dog world of modern British society. The video supporting the song is an acerbic, bile-filled treatise on the country’s demise juxtaposed with taglines of inequity that pop out with the intensity of an adolescent’s eyes glued to their TikTok For You Page.
The strength of Lambrini Girls is that they understand the position they are in. They are young warriors in the army of Gen Z kids that don’t see any way of puncturing the force field of white-male privilege that currently props up our world. But good punk rock- and, trust me, Lunny and Macieira are making good punk rock- takes a bloodied fist to that force field, the first shot in a generational battle. And with enough fists, there might just be enough to break through and make a change.
If “God’s Country” was the rallying cry that drew the mobs to the court, the first three songs of Who Let The Dogs Out are direct fucking hits. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an opening salvo as confident as these three hyper-focused, powerful songs of revolution on any album coming out in the next twelve months. Opener “Bad Apple” starts with the ubiquitous wail of a police siren. Clanging, industrial drums come in, and Macieira’s overdriven bass drives the song forward. Phoebe Lunny snarls her way through the lyrics, as if she’s just fallen out the door of a London pub at the end of the night and is ready for a fucking fight. Lunny sounds like she’s just inches away from you and you’ve just spewed some Joe Rogan bullshit her way, and she’s spitting truth. You can almost feel the saliva splattered across your face.
Second song “Company Culture” is an even more acerbic takedown of the bro-network that permeates corporate society like some testosterone-fueled slime mold of misogyny and toxic masculinity. This song, along with the next song “Big Dick Energy”, has some of the sharpest lyrics, and with Lunny’s almost spoken-shout delivery they come off as the final nail in the coffin of white privilege. In “Company Culture” Lunny plays the role of the demure female employee, often going along with the toxic behavior in order to keep her job- she’s blonde, unthreatening, and knows how to use a computer just enough to not make the males feel uncomfortable.
But “Big Dick Energy” is what she’s screaming at the club to her friends who are all going through the same thing. And it’s all of us, by the way. Not just the ‘nice’ guys. In fact, in Lambrini Girls‘ world of rock and roll some of those sensitive artist types end up being the most annoying perpetrators of verbal violence of them all.
‘Big dick energy
Big dick energy
I’m one of the nice guys, so why won’t you have sex with me?
Cos it’s not that big
Big dick energy
Crying Ironically
Yet you act like I’m your Mother and your therapist
You’re not that big!’
“Big Dick Energy” at this point, should be the name of Trump’s new cabinet. Lambrini Girls understand that this shit has been going on for time immemorial, and it’s about time half of the population started calling the other half out for their bullshit. It’s ironic that the world has seemed to take a shift backwards, but that’s what punk rock is for: to pull us back from the edge of inequality.
The meat of the album is an exploration of punk rock in all its forms. The guitars are meaty and big, with the production complementing the band’s intense rock and roll sound. Maciera’s bass playing is all propulsive down-strokes, matching the four-to-the-floor drumming of the mysterious Banksy. Daniel Fox, from the Irish punks Gilla Band, produced the album, and he does a good job of eliciting the organic, live, in-the-room feel of good punk rock. On “Nothing Tastes As Good as It Feels” the guitar slinks as if it’s off of The Damned album from 1977, and “You’re Not From Around Here” has the angular feel of a Mission of Burma song, as Lunny screams and rails against gentrification. The mid-section of the album- while not quite as strong as the front three- is a workmanlike approach to four chords and the truth.
If the middle of the album drags a bit, the youthful, explosive energy of closer “Cuntology 101” lifts it right out of whatever cesspool of societal slop Lambrini Girls are shit-kicking their way out of. The song is a glorious mashup of electroclash vigor, an homage to LCD Soundsystem at their ugliest and Le Tigre at their most melodic. But it’s the lyrics of Lunny that really pushes the song into a singular level. There’s a cunt in all of us, she seems to say, be it the time you took a shit at your friend’s house or when you lifted a pack of cigarettes from the local Tinee Giant. Hell, even having an autistic breakdown is cunty. If being yourself is being a cunt, the band seems to say- well, go ahead and be a cunt.
With all due respect to England, America is the country that’s ushering in a new era of testosterone-filled bro-logic. Social media is filled with white cis-gender males complaining about being censored and pushing the agenda of any nutcase who can sit on a leather chair in front of a microphone and spew nonsense. And the leader of the free world is a misogynistic narcissist, the kind of character Lambrini Girls have made it their duty to rip apart. And this is the profound importance of punk rock, from the righteous wailing of Minor Threat in the early ‘80s to the equally righteous cacophony of Lambrini Girls in 2025, punk rock is a way of channeling our societal rage, bringing the voices of the oppressed front and center. Who Let The Dogs Out is a confident, outrageous treatise on the modern world as seen from the lens of two twenty-something girls from Brighton, and the world’s a better place for it. What more could you ask for?
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