[City Slang; 2025]
Lambrini Girls‘ debut LP Who Let The Dogs Out shares its title with the classic hit song by Baha Men, a song which somehow managed to win a Grammy. I was incredulous about this fact for a long time, until I found out that the song – a staple at frat parties – is actually an anti-cat calling song. I wonder, however, if the average person at a frat party realizes this when the song blares from the speakers. Probably not.
That being said, Lambrini Girls write noisy punk rock anthems, a proven crucible for protest and revolt over several decades. There’s nothing like a good racket on stage to get a message across. Lambrini Girls’ goal is magnanimous: shatter the trend of feminist punk rock being tokenized and/or reduced to the margins. Groups like X-Ray Spex, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney and Downtown Boys have paved the way, but as close studies, Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira know full well there’s still a lot of work to be done. It begs the question: can Who Let The Dogs Out catapult Lambrini Girls to stratospheres beyond those who already drink their Kool Aid?
Aiming to write some artsy conceptual piece de resistance seems only self-serving for this unapologetically political band. Spanning 12 firecrackers of frustration, Lambrini Girls diligently keep their eye on the ball on Who Let The Dogs Out. Not by putting on their overthinking caps, but by wearing cool flamboyant cowboy hats, shotgunning cheap booze bought from a local bodega and having pillow fights in unmade beds. Lambrini Girls don’t want to self-seriously educate the aches of society; they want to show that doing just that isn’t mutually exclusive from having a shit ton of fun. Or at the least, a skin-deep idea of what’s supposed to be fun… but is actually rather tragic? Thoughts reserved for maybe something other than this here review.
Either way, that extroverted flamboyance been evident from the band’s live shows: razzle dazzle, frenzied affairs that blur the lines between audience and performer, with Lunny and Macieira habitually crawling, skipping or climbing someplace other than the stage as a positive form of space invasion. They are joyous, communal affairs, but there’s also the letting go of inhibitions. It sparks questions such as ‘Is there such a thing as socially conscious benders?’, and whether making political punk music through a prism of ‘intoxicated irreverence’ is in any way constructive. For a band that has a brand of sparkling wine embedded in their very name, these are pertinent questions.
Unabashed hedonism appears to be all the rage these days, especially for young people who had part of their wild-and-free days cut short by a global pandemic. But the big challenge remains, how to imbue hedonism with a consciousness. Charli xcx, for example, has juxtaposed it brilliantly with introspection, whereas someone like The Dare – like him or not – convincingly lampoons the materialist party crashing indie-sleaze persona.
Lambrini Girls certainly have both the giddiness and the charisma to get themselves into the mix, which is a good thing if you want to turn some heads and incite positive change. Merely being a lone wolf in the toxic henhouse that is the music industry has them fated as many like-minded predecessors: critically lauded, but ultimately ratio’ed as – shuddering as I type this – ‘cult favorites’, a term unfortunately abused by gatekeepers to marginalise genuinely important and influential music. In a world that coerces you to doomspell yourself to bed-ridden misery, I’d like to manifest some positive thinking here: Who Let The Dogs Out has all the ingredients to break that aforementioned loop and move the needle further – with each track managing an infectious balancing act between cheeky humor and righteous rage.
Opening track “Bad Apple” employs a thundering Death From Above 1979-esque riff as an antidote to police brutality. Though the humor is delightfully scathing, Lambrini Girls manage to unnerve the listener as well following up a hammy “Police officer, what seems to be the problem!?” with a chilling, almost deadpan delivery of the follow-up question, amidst a brief spell of silence: “Or can we only know post-mortem?” Lunny seems to realise that if this question was uttered during an anti-genocide protest, it would likely earn a nightstick to the chin. It’s a great moment of unfurled emotional release tempered with a very real tension.
There’s no shortage of laugh out loud zingers on Who Let The Dogs Out. In the outro of the Kate Moss-referencing “Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels” – a song that addresses eating disorder and body positivity – Lunny bluntly bellows that “Also, diet drinks taste like absolute fucking shit!” It’s the kind of unfettered ad lib moment that you can imagine spawned from the recording sessions of the album, frantically squeezed in-between long hectic tours. Though fight-or-flight situations are generally stress-inducing, Lambrini Girls have so far thrived in them, reinforcing their ability to pour their deep-seated concerns into palatable quotables. But you wonder if that’s a healthy thing for a career over the longer term.
Who Let The Dogs Out doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, adopting reliable punk stylistics to usher the message clearly and concisely: from fuzzed out garage (the anti-gentrification anthem “You’re Not From Around Here”) to old school anarcho-punk (“Filthy Rich Nepo Baby”, a hysterical tale of rich kids fetishising working class music spaces). Lambrini Girls embrace the urgency to pierce beyond ‘fuck the patriarchy’ tropes, magnifying their admonishments with spicy specificity. On post-punk cluster bomb “Big Dick Energy” they speak on how misogyny isn’t just an alpha male trait, as Lunny crudely pantomimes: “I’m onе of the nice guys / So why won’t you have sex with me?” It addresses the performative allyship to feminism of a lot of guys to gain favor to women, while simultaneously – when it’s just boys among boys – they engage in the same lewd and sexist behavior they publicly condemn. In the music industry, these are important things to express, because it simply reeks of supposed ‘progressive’ marketing – I’m naming Spotify’s EQUAL campaigns here specifically – that covertly mitigate the very message it conveys.
Who Let The Dogs Out shows a serious growth spurt in internalised wisdom for Lunny and Macieira. Earlier songs like “Help Me I’m Gay” (“Yet everything I do is for the male gaze”) and “Body of Mine” (“If my gender is so radical I’d rather be invisible”) highlighted inner struggles on sexuality, and how the outside world forces you to abide to strict gender binaries. On “No Homo” – the catchiest song on Who Let The Dogs Out, and that’s saying something – Lambrini Girls have found a joyous answer to those dwellings. It’s a cheeky song about the laws of attraction that finally thrashes that infuriating asterisk into the bin. The saccharine harmonies of the first chorus go “I like your face but not in a gay way” and in the subsequent ones, the song’s protagonist has gotten over the hump: “I like your face and it’s in a gay way”. That’s about as transparent as you can get.
Lambrini Girls have discussed the pitfalls of making a shopping list of subjects to cover, recognising the danger of trivialising the very things they fight for so passionately. On Who Let The Dogs Out they turn inward on “Special Different” – a loud/quiet song that addresses the stigma and social struggles that come with neurodiversity (something this neurodivergent person can wholeheartedly relate to), and “Love”, which attempts to highlight the toxic power dynamics in relationships. These more introspective songs don’t quite reach the entertainment value of a “No Homo” or “Lads Lads Lads”, but it’s great to see Lambrini Girls taking steps to evolve beyond the things they already do well, even if the results thus far are a bit of a mixed bag.
The final track “Cuntology 101” is their first plunge into risque call-and-response synth pop of the Chicks on Speed and Peaches-variety – a stylistic that fits Lambrini Girls’ horse sense for catchy hooks to a tee. And better yet, leaves the door open for their next recording chapter. Because for all intents, Who Let The Dogs Out is a fun record made amidst a storm of buzz. But I personally loathe the term “pressure makes diamonds”, and I am left to wonder what Lambrini Girls can do with more time and clarity to cook and ferment their infectious creativity.
But with this album, they’ve proven something big: dismantling oppressive structures doesn’t need to happen with a judgmental frown – you can do so with as much moxie as you so insist. And showing that the line between comedy and tragedy can be rail thin.
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