Fat Dog are finding another kind of energy

It is a simple way of describing what Fat Dog have always done. Woof., the debut studio album from the British outfit, was built around movement. The stomping songs, the dance-punk, the noise of it all. But Love has since realised there are other things worth chasing. “You realise that it's nice to do other stuff musically, isn't it?” he shares, reflecting on the response that Woof. received and the differences between it and the upcoming follow-up. “It’s nice to get people, you know, feeling. It’s not all about wanting a fucking massive mosh pit. It’s kind of nice to see other shit.”

That shift is at the heart of Cancel Me (I’m Tired). The band’s second record still has plenty of the hedonistic energy that defined Woof., but here there is less interest in maintaining one particular intensity. Love says part of that came from the live show itself. As their sets have become longer, with fans flocking for a night of sweat and stamping, writing an entire album of heavy songs would eventually wear everyone out. “If we wrote two albums that were all like the most heavy music, then it would probably knacker the audience as well as us,” he laughs. “So having a few more ‘normal’ songs in there is pretty beneficial.”

Despite that, this change wasn’t mapped out in advance. “It’s just the songs that you write and the songs that you think are the best fit,” Love says. “That’s not intentional. It’s kind of finding the balance of what you write and what you want to write.” After all, trying to recreate Woof. would risk losing the thing that made it exciting in the first place. Instead, Fat Dog are following whatever gives them that feeling of discovering something new. “You have to stay true to what you actually want to do rather than going for what you think maybe the audience is expecting,” adds Hughes before Love finishes: “Yeah we want to go, oh shit, that sounds good.”

The process itself is suitably messy. Hughes describes it as “creatively flailing for new stuff,” with ideas accumulating until they can be pulled apart and put back together. Love is particularly fond of writing loads of songs and taking pieces from each one. Hughes has a name for it: Modular songwriting. The single “Call It What You Want”, for example, began life closer to a trance song before the band rewrote it. Meanwhile “Aliens” grew from “just an idea that [Love] had, and then flowed into another idea, and then another.” It makes sense for a band that is so non-stop to keep moving forwards until something holds their attention long enough to explore it. 

Lyrically, listeners can expect a more vulnerable record. “From start to finish, I wanted the song to be about a certain thing,” Love muses. “I wanted to write about something, which I haven’t really done before.” The result, he feels, is a more personal record. Hughes agrees, pointing to a stronger lyrical component than on the previous album and saying there are moments he can pinpoint to things that have happened over the past two years.

For all that, Fat Dog have not suddenly become earnest. Their sense of humour is what makes the more sincere parts of the record possible, with Love seeing laughter as a way of making difficult things easier to live with. Hughes describes it as a particularly British kind of gallows humour, allowing you to “say something personal without completely laying your heart on the table.” Love is particularly interested in that tension: “I think the best songs are like when you can have a very serious line and a very fucking stupid line right after each other.” Anything too saccharine, they agree, becomes difficult to relate to. “Feels preachy also,” Love adds. “Yeah, don’t want no preaching. Fat Dog, no preaching. I like that.”

That attitude appears to extend beyond the writing. Since Woof., Fat Dog have grown up as a band, and Hughes and Love are both conscious of how different things feel from those early days. What once felt like being on holiday has become more professional. They still drink, they still occasionally play gigs badly, and they can still come away convinced they have just played the best show of their lives. Love remembers one particularly messy show in Belgium where the band thought they had delivered “one for the history books,” only to hear from people afterwards that “it wasn’t sounding too good.”

It all comes back to what is perhaps the most noticeable change between Woof. and Cancel Me (I’m Tired). The band is not abandoning the mosh pit. They’re simply interested in what might exist beside it. “We can make a song that’s hard, or make a song that tries to get people moving, and a song that will, you know, make them feel something,” says Love. “It’s a lot more exciting for us as musicians.” 

For a band that has spent so long on the road, that curiosity seems to be keeping them moving in its own way. The record was finished in March, but Love is already thinking about the next one. After years of playing the same songs, he says the first album can become nostalgic simply because you’ve performed it so many times. Then a new song arrives and suddenly there is something unfamiliar again. “I think that the feeling of being creative, or just making stuff, is the most exciting part of doing music,” he concludes.

Fat Dog will soon be taking these new songs back into the rooms where their music has always made the most immediate sense. There will be noise, humour, and mosh pits. But this group of “five-to-seven weird dudes on stage” have spent long enough proving they can make a room explode. This time, they’re interested in seeing what else they can make people feel.