Canadian Punk Group PUP has just released their 5th studio album, titled “Who Will Look After The Dogs?”
This album is the band’s first since their 2021 record “THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND,” and in a lot of ways a return to the band’s original heavier sound.
The album is produced in a way that is much more rough and raw than some of the band’s more refined and poppy work, and it gives the sound a certain underground quality that the group has recently steered more clear of. This is to say that a lot of this LP sounds more strictly punk than pop-punk.
Quite a few of the album’s songs were released as singles prior to the PUP album’s release, perhaps the most notable of which being Get Dumber featuring pop-punk legend Jeff Rosenstock. All of these singles were treats, but the song Paranoid particularly stands out, having already amassed nearly 800,000 Spotify streams in the few months it’s been released. Paranoid is a perfect example of this more heavy sound from the band, as it features some truly raw instrumentals while still holding onto lead singer Stefan Babcock’s rich melodies.
The album keeps up this sound throughout, much to its benefit on standout songs such as Concrete, which almost sounds like it could be an extra cut off of the band’s most acclaimed album “Morbid Stuff.” Another standout factor of the album is the drumming performance from Zack Mykula, who keeps up his longtime standard of providing songs with unique drum parts which separate a lot of the group’s music from sounding like more generic pop-punk.
To give a little bit of subjective analysis, I would say that this LP represents a level-up from the band’s previous album, and a quality that is on par with “Morbid Stuff,” as some of the best music that the group has put out. In no small part, this can be attributed to the general feeling that this project was really guided by a more authentic sound than the band has ever before seen.
All in all, the project, which was the culmination of many scattered years of studio work, represents a full fleshing out of the sound that PUP has developed over the past decade or so, and another great addition to the band’s catalogue.
With the release of “Who Will Look After The Dogs?”, the band is beginning their tour in the United Kingdom, which will kick off a long touring season that will eventually see them travelling to Australia, the United States, other parts of Europe, and of course, back to their home and native land here in Canada, where they will perform at legendary venues such as the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto and the Bronson Centre here in Ottawa.
