When Fat Dog, the UK’s latest post-punk export, hopped on tour with Viagra Boys last year, they enraged a few fans riding hard for the headliner. “We got a lot of hate from people because they didn’t want to see the support act ‘out-do’ anyone,” Fat Dog frontman Joe Love explained to NME this spring. Fuming that the South London five-piece were punching above their weight, one dissatisfied concertgoer accused Love of being “arrogant,” calling him “a tiny little prick,” as Fat Dog keyboardist Chris Hughes remembered.
I’ve never seen Fat Dog live, but their reputation as performers has made its way into every published piece on the band. It’s what attracted their devoted following (who reportedly call themselves “the Kennel”), and landed them a record deal with Domino even before releasing their first single. Loyal to their rabid fanbase, Fat Dog let the Kennel select the initial track they recorded for Domino: a seven-minute thumper called “King of the Slugs” that came out last summer. Like most of the songs on Fat Dog’s debut album, WOOF., “King of the Slugs” is a hybrid strain of hard rock and EDM, blown-out bass and revving synths lurching into tweaked klezmer-techno. Often filtered through reverb, Love’s blunt and grizzled vocals recall bullish forebears like Idles and Fat White Family.
In April, Fat Dog played “King of the Slugs” to a packed house at Electric Brixton, a 1,500 capacity venue in South London—the same part of town that’s birthed post-punk revivalists like Shame, Dry Cleaning, and Goat Girl in recent years. Footage from the show captures the crowd pogoing in unison as Love waves a white cowboy hat over them like a rodeo preacher. Behind him, drummer John Hutchinson sweats beneath his rubber dog mask, its jaw agape and tongue spilling out the front. Much fanfare has been made of the costumes and hijinks, and the audience is going batshit—but Love seems a bit joyless and contained, like he doesn’t quite believe in the product he’s peddling. That same sense of detachment is smudged across WOOF., mucking up the surface with its dull, grayish residue.
Bemoaning rock’s cerebral turn, Love formed Fat Dog in 2021 with a batch of demos he’d made during lockdown. The band’s mandate: to make fun, ridiculous music. Something people could dance or thrash to. Hughes, Hutchinson, bassist Ben Harris, and woodwind player Morgan Wallace helped shape Love’s source material into zany bruisers with punk heft and club tempos. But despite the flatulent sax bursts and Love’s occasionally jagged howl, WOOF. feels decidedly un-fun, more like a series of cynical decisions looped on repeat.
