Toronto punk cult favourites PUP are back with a juggernaut of a record, Who Will Look After The Dogs?. They take Wonderland through the track list.
Since their fist-wielding self-titled debut a decade back, Toronto four-piece have been a monstrous presence in the underground punk space. Sharing their fifth full-length body of work, Who Will Look After The Dogs?, the band illustrate a broader approach and dynamic posterior that feels mature and cohesive whilst unpredictable and heavy-hitting with touches of introspection and off-kilter grandiosity.
With a world tour to come, the act are bigger and better than ever. They stop by Wonderland to delve deep into the excellent new LP, track-by-track.
Listen to the album…
Read the track-by-track…
“NO HOPE”
Some songs take forever. Sometimes years. Other songs, like “No Hope”, take minutes. I’ve always found dark comfort in a bleak worldview. It’s a defence mechanism. Being hopeful opens you up to all sorts of disappointment. Even as a kid I was pretty nihilistic. There’s a freedom to be found in the pointlessness of existence. I was reminded of the feeling recently when I started dating someone who was always glass half-full. I always wondered what the fuck is wrong with those people who just naturally assume things will work out. It was a breath of fresh air. Anyway, things didn’t work out. No Hope, baby.
“OLIVE GARDEN”
This is a very stupid, but I think, wonderful song, and it contains one of my proudest rhymes, “Olive Garden” with “Grandma was in a coffin”. I just realized, while typing that out, that it actually doesn’t rhyme at all. Whatever. Listen to the song and tell me it doesn’t work. It works. I wrote this song as a joke, with little expectation of it making the record. My feelings on it were: “this is a nice song. Maybe it will make my friends laugh”. The thing that changed my mind was when the band took hold of it. Zack (who plays drums) heard this cute little acoustic guitar demo and decided we should try and make it as heavy as possible. Which is objectively, an annoying thing to suggest. But I kept my stupid mouth shut and that was the smartest thing I’ve done in a long time because you know what, this song rips now. It’s catchy and nice but it’s got these disgusting, grinding, detuned guitars and Zack’s beating the shit out of his drum kit, and there’s an upsetting amount of distortion that really brings out a different kinda uncomfortable magic in this song. Proud of the guys for making lemons out of lemonade.
“CONCRETE”
“Concrete” is one of my favourite songs on this record. It’s simple in a way that most PUP songs aren’t. A lot of our songs, while they might seem simple on the surface, are actually annoyingly complex in a way that is not necessarily good or interesting or anything. We call it “overcooking”. When a song gets “overcooked” it means we’ve become neurotic to the point that all the magic has been sucked dry. Honestly, a fairly common phenomena in the PUP jam space. We tried really hard not to do that with “Concrete”, and I think we nailed it.
Lyrically, a lot of this song is me grappling with the fact that I air so much dirty laundry publicly, as a byproduct of writing songs. It’s not something I like doing, I’m a pretty private person, but it is what it is. The lyrics “do you really think I want to drag your corpse all over the concrete?” are about that. I guess the saving grace here is that I drag myself more than anyone else so hopefully that kinda makes up for it. When I’m discussing the songs (say in a track by track breakdown), I try hard to make it about me, not about another person. Because no one should get dragged in public just because we know each other. Anyway,sorry to everybody who knows me and everybody I know. I’m sorry that you know me. My bad.
“GET DUMBER” ft. Jeff Rosenstock
I wrote this song in my friend Jeff Rosenstock’s basement. He was on tour and I was house sitting for him and I recorded the demo on his guitar using all his mics and stuff. The ghost of Jeff is all over that demo and embedded in the DNA of the song, which is why I felt like he had to sing on the track as well. We recorded the vocals together in the same room, facing each other, screaming into one another’s face. It was fun. I like Jeff.
You can pick apart these lyrics pretty easily. It’s mostly about being in a band, getting dragged by an industry designed to keep you in a pit of self-despair. It’s something I’ve written about before. Self-destruction sells. Some bands achieve a bit of success and buy into their hype. For others, you enter a shame spiral, a relentless onslaught of imposter syndrome and embarrassment that’s further exacerbated by an industry hungry for you to continue debasing yourself. I’m in the second school of thought. As is Jeff. He used to play in a band called Bomb The Music Industry, so you can assume that we are fairly aligned on this specific topic.
“HUNGER FOR DEATH”
This song took 3 years to write. It started as a weird electro beat that I made. It wasn’t supposed to be a PUP song, but there was something special in it. So we tried arranging it full band and it sucked. We pushed it to the backburner. A year later we tore it apart and tried again. Same results. We went into the studio with this song decidedly in the trash, not one to ever be recorded or see the light of day. On our second last day in the studio, I woke up with this whole other take on this song in my brain. I don’t really know where it came from. We went into the studio and laid it all down in an hour or two, everyone enthusiastic about the song for the first time in forever, pitching in their own weird ideas. It was the last song we’d record for the album, and one that we all ended up loving. It was like throwing a Hail Mary on a song that had been pissing us off for years.
“NEEDED TO HEAR IT”
It’s no secret that the 4 of us in PUP have a pretty contentious relationship. We’ve been a band for well over a decade and never even once considered a lineup change, so you know there’s a healthy level of respect and love there. But we do fight a lot. A lot. Especially when we’re writing music together. Every few months we have an Airing of Grievances, essentially a premeditated, organized bloodbath where we rip each other apart in hopes that it’ll be like a pressure valve release that lets us start fresh. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it unleashes a further torrent of passive aggression, negativity, vitriol. It’s a fun dynamic to have with your best friends! You should try it. We can all be kinda shitty to each other but if I’m being honest, I’m probably the biggest offender. So while yes, this song is about me laying the hard truths on the people I love, it’s also about being told things I might not feel comfortable hearing. At the end of the day, this band is rooted in love for each other, and the point of the Airing of Grievances isn’t really to make each other feel bad, it’s about addressing the hard stuff head on so we can all try to become slightly less shitty people. Which, at the end of the day, is all anyone can do.
“PARANOID”
My favourite song on this record. One of my favourite PUP songs, period. I think it’s the four of us, at our best. It’s heavy, it’s catchy, it’s emotional, and it’s goofy and kinda dumb. I’m really proud of this one, which is a rare feeling for me. On every other song there are things I would change if we had to do it again, but not this one. My favourite part of this song is in the breakdown in the bridge. It’s probably the heaviest part of the whole record, Zack is going so hard, Steve’s ripping some disgusting dissonant chords, I’m screaming my head off about how incredibly sad I am and Nestor is just off on his own journey, playing the melody from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on the bass. It’s fucking funny. It makes me laugh every time I hear it. That is PUP distilled into a single, wonderful moment.
“FALLING OUTTA LOVE”
You may have noticed that there’s a bit of a chronology to this record. The earlier songs are written from the perspective of a much younger me, a lot more oblivious and acerbic. By this point in the record we’re coming up on present day, and the songs are getting more self-reflective. It’s a lot easier to write songs about being a clueless dipshit. The self-reflective stuff, I think, is usually better, but the tradeoff is this: if you don’t want the songs to suck, you have to be really, brutally honest with yourself. It’s about digging deep into the yuckiest parts of your brain to see what egregious truths about your character lay in there. And then telling the world all about the fetid bullshit you found. There’s one line in this song that has stuck with me, it is an honest realization I came to when thinking about myself and all the relationships I’ve had (romantic and otherwise):
How was I supposed to stand you when I couldn’t even stand myself.
It felt fucked up and harsh to write. And it felt fucked up and harsh to sing. And that usually means it’s kinda bang on, unfortunately for me.
Also shout out to Zack on this one for my favourite drum groove on this record.
“CRUEL”
Here’s another song that’s kinda about my bandmates, but I guess I could apply it to many relationships in my life. But I definitely wrote it with my bandmates in mind, feeling guilty about some blow up or other we had in the jam space. As a band we took this song and tried to make it as fun as possible, searching for some relief and some catharsis from the lyrical content. This song in particular, we threw all sorts of stupid at the wall to see what would stick. Halfway through the song Zack plays a rototom solo for absolutely no reason aside from the fact that it’s funny and reminded him of Neil Peart. Steve plays a mind numbingly dumb (but also really fucking good) guitar solo that sounds like shit in the best way possible, it reminds me of two dial up modems getting into an argument with each other. As for me, I had been dying to yell “AWWWW YEAH!” somewhere on this record because that’s just a very stupid thing for a band that’s not Nickelback to do. And I snuck it in on this one. Also the song just keeps going. On and on. It’s really annoying in a way that makes all of us laugh. I really wanted this to be the last track on the record because it leaves me with a smile but that’s another thing we disagreed on and fought about. So yeah, you’re beginning to understand this band dynamic. Of course we would fight over a song that’s about us fighting.
“HALLWAYS”
The lyrics to “Hallways” were the first ones I wrote for this record. I wrote them the same week we announced our last album, coincidentally titled “The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND”, while the rest of my life simultaneously imploded around me. It was a weird fucking week. I remember sitting on the floor of my room and punching out all those lyrics, and at the top of the page I wrote “Who will look after the dog?”. It was the very first line I wrote for this entire record. That line (with a slight adjustment) would become the title of the album. It feels fitting. It’s heartbreaking, but also, overdramatic and stupid as hell. If it’s not clear at this point, I’m fairly unwell mentally a lot of the time. When I’m deep in the abyss I think crazy dark thoughts. I don’t love much about myself, but one of the things I do love is that when I finally crawl out of that hole, I’m usually able to reflect on those thoughts and laugh at how ridiculous they are. I don’t take myself too seriously, I have a good sense of humour about that stuff. And that’s the place I try to come from when I’m writing most songs. Realizing that the pain is real, but it’s also stupid and kinda funny once you take a step back and see it a bit more objectively. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying, the title for this record comes from this song and I think it’s a great title, because it encapsulates so much of what we are trying to accomplish with this band. Also, dogs.
“BEST REVENGE”
Holy fuck this song took a long time for us to write. It went through a hundred different versions. Because of that, I honestly have some pretty mixed, complicated feelings about this song. Remember when I was talking before about “overcooking”? That’s this song. I think the chorus is really catchy. I think there are really weird, fun, interesting moments. But it was also such a struggle to get across the finish line that it left a bit of a sour taste in all of our mouths. Everyone outside the four of us thought this song should be the single. And maybe that would’ve been the smart decision. But we’ve never been a band to do the “smart” thing just because it was a good business choice. We tend to follow our gut. All four of us know that there’s something cool about this song and it deserves to be on this record, but we also know that we spent way too much time on it and didn’t want it to be the single because it would mean spending that much more time with a song we were already sick of. That’s a wild truth to tell the world right as you’re putting out your record. Whoops!
“SHUT UP”
I love this song, and it’s unlike anything else on the record. It’s really stripped back and mellow and mostly just me playing, and the intention was always that the band was gonna come crashing in at the end. We arranged an outro that was “fine”, but certainly not “great”. We got into the studio and played it, and John Congleton (who produced this record, and is by the way, an incredible producer and one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met) was like “meh… Maybe try something different at the end?”. So we played it again, no one knowing really knowing what we were doing. And as soon as everyone kicked in it sounded awesome. Maybe because it was so undercooked, we were all actually really paying attention to each other and what was happening, in a way we usually don’t. We finished the take and I was like “That was sick. Now that we know what we’re doing let’s do it properly”. And Congleton was like “it’s never gonna sound that special again, I think we should keep it”. He was right. Every time I hear it I think about what a great moment it was playing that outro for the first time. And while I still personally think we shoulda ended the record on “Cruel” (no, I will NOT let that petty argument go), I do think “Shut Up” is still a pretty great way to end this record. There’s a melancholy and uncertainty in those last few moments but also relief and finality and joy in the four of us being so present and connected to one another in those last few seconds. It doesn’t always happen that way, and you gotta cherish those moments when they come around.
