Dog Chocolate (Upset The Rhythm) announce new album 'So Inspired, So Done In', due 27th February
Fourth album of chewed up punk, post-punk, noise and pop from UK-based four-piece
FFO: Deerhoof, Huggy Bear, Minutemen, Unwound, Dry Cleaning
Dog Chocolate
Announce new album, 'So Inspired, So Done In'
Due 27th February via Upset The Rhythm
Share new single "Employee"
Watch the video here
After 7 strange years of relative silence, and 13 years of being a band, Dog Chocolate have returned with ‘So Inspired, So Done In’. Their fourth album is their most focused, cohesive and song-y yet. They still sound like a bin full of wasps, but now the bin has double-cream or a Viennetta or something at the bottom. While many of the 16 songs on here barely make it past the 3-minute mark, each one is bursting with all the textures and colours of an office cupboard: full of old sweets, fluorescent markers, and multiple ways to fix paper together.
New single "Employee" is a bouncy, dissonant song with a surfy undertone, and a simple verse/chorus/verse structure, in which Rob and Andrew trade vocals about the weird experience of the mid-2020s job market.
They share: "Rob’s chorus voices confusion about the nature of his employment, being “an employee…a contractor…on zero-hours…self-employed” seemingly all at the same time. Andrew says of his verses “for me the song is about the struggle of starting to become some version of yourself that is lessened and alien, and trying to survive in an environment which is at odds with your true self”"
Dog Chocolate - Employee
Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Fs9xtfx8w
Streaming services: https://linktr.ee/upsettherhythm
Album Preorder:
https://upsettherhythm.bigcartel.com
So Inspired, So Done In sees Dog Chocolate tackling subject matter as diverse as overheard conversations, healing fungal toenails, the Rogerian concept of the Actualising Tendency, bronze age living conditions, dreaming songs into being and human-plant relations. Work (and anti-work) is a recurring theme, as is artistic inspiration and burnout.
Dog Chocolate revel in the mundane and incidental, to explore bigger, existential questions. Recorded and mixed by POZI’s Toby Burroughs and mastered by Sofia Lopes, So Inspired, So Done In charts a long and confusing period in the band’s collective life, marked by major life changes, losses and shifts, colouring the band’s trademark frantic, daft and anxious energy with a contemplative glaze. Dog Chocolate continue to investigate their internal and external landscapes with playful curiosity, frustration, silliness and empathy.
More about Dog Chocolate...
Pre/history of the band: In the early 2000’s Andrew (vocals), Rob (guitar, vocals) and Matthew (guitar, vocals) played together as teenagers in South-East London-based maximalist, costumed surrealist punk band Yeborobo. They met drummer Jonathan playing with his instrument-swapping masked band Limn at art space Utrophia in Deptford. Later, when both bands had split, Dog Chocolate formed with a shared desire to make a band that was simpler than their theatrical past: small amps and light guitars, no more than 2 drums at any one time, a keyboard no longer than a ruler and a shared ethos… “it’s about giving a shit, but at the same time not giving a shit, but not ‘whatever’, not giving up never!”. The band floated the term “pencilcase punk” to describe their jumbled, colourful, dense and instant music.
Dog Chocolate built on this early scrappiness, bedding into their sound over several albums. Their first “Or” (2014) was a split with Ravioli Me Away, soon followed by “Snack Fans” (2016) and “Moody Balloon Baby” (2018). Along the way they played gigs with bands as wide ranging as Deerhoof, No Age, Dry Cleaning, Palm, Daniel Wakeford, Shopping and Pozi.
After the pandemic, some of the band’s members moved to different cities, got new jobs, some had babies, some encountered bereavement. All things that slowed down the pace of the band, making it harder to practice and play together. The band found a way to keep their friendship and creativity going through making a monthly radio show, “The CDRs Won’t Last”. This initially tried to chronicle the lost music of the Myspace era, but latterly became a fun place to just chat and play songs to each other. These life changes, as well as this period of a different relational pace, influenced the way the songs on ‘So Inspired, So Done In’ came together. It was written in bedrooms, over the internet, and in a large shed in Shropshire (for a weekend writing get-together), rather than in the usual practice space.
The scrappy, pop-punk of “Green Stuff” stemmed from the idea that while humans continually slather concrete and tarmac over habitats, nature always finds a way to reclaim them when left unattended. “This echoed with the brewing unrest of nation states trying to aggressively take what is not theirs”, they elaborate, "It felt like an interesting comparison”. In his verse Rob challenges the metaphor of a war between plants and humans used in the song and imagines a “mutual aid between our tree and flower comrades”. The song describes cycles of growth, decay, impermanence and how all this (in Andrew’s lyrical description) is “bonkers and exquisite”.
“Infinite Nuggets” is a fizzing popping candy of a song; Andrew’s chorus of “Nuggets, nuggets, infinite nuggets, I didn’t make ‘em I found ‘em” would surely be a stadium anthem in an alternate universe. Andrew shares, "in retrospect the lyrics here and throughout a lot of the record relate to my recently diagnosed ADHD. Here specifically how layered thoughts, big and small pop up out of nowhere, play on a loop, fight for space then vanish. Infinite Nuggets is about getting used to the fact that the best ideas, are gonna pop into my conscious and disappear as they please, and a reminder that there's a garden bursting with these fruits just beyond my conscious”.
With a tendency to converse with each other both lyrically and musically cultivated over many years, the members of Dog Chocolate bounce off each other, respectfully disagree, try to make each other laugh and share some of their most vulnerable feelings with each other. ‘So Inspired, So Done In’ is their own unique offering during these unsteady times: a language of friendship translated into songs.
Tracklist:
1. Infinite Nuggets
2. Fun is Always Brilliant
3. Employee
4. Springfield Library Haunting
5. Drumming on a Tree with FM
6. Potatoes in the Basement Bin
7. Fungal Free 2023
8. Green Stuff
9. Architecture Days
10. Munchies and a Pen
11. Guildford Awkward
12. No Pavement Story
13. Worst Jobs in History
14. Unfinished Rock ‘N’ Roll Tattoo
15. A Bit of Paper
16. So Inspired, So Done In
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