Who Will Look After The Dogs?

PUP have made albums a lot more fun than this, but for sheer impact and focus, this feels like their best work to date, even if the recently dumped might find it a bit too relatable for comfort.

Babcock strikes the perfect blend of distress and condemnation in his vocal delivery, expressing righteous indignation at these lived realities.

Who Will Look After The Dogs feels more intensely personal than anything the band have made before.

For four full-length albums, PUP have been peeling back their collective neuroses, writing great songs largely from the frame of how nerve-frying, exhausting, and infuriating it is being a touring band. Somehow, Who Will Look After the Dogs? is even more fatalistic. .... The band’s greatest trick is making the results feel cathartic rather than dour.

In a first for PUP, the best tracks on their album are slow songs and mid-tempo romps, which bolster Who Will Look After the Dogs? after its rambunctious opening track.

As it stands, the more things change the more that stay the same. But, when you have a formula as egregiously glorious and cacophonous as PUP is no bad thing.

The songs run the emotional gamut from “No Hope” to “Hunger 4 Death” to “Shut Up.” But there’s a warm cameraderie at the heart of their music, which is why even their darkest songs—and these are almost all dark—still can feel uplifting.

Who Will Look After the Dogs? is a long way from a perfect record, but this is no obstacle to respecting it on its own terms — as a sadsack burnout trip from a band that has lost sight of almost all its past brilliance and knows it, but still has enough dignity to own its scrappy qualities for what they are, rather than inadvertently collapsing into them (The Unraveling of PUPTheBand) and/or self-consciously hawking them (per The Unravelling of PUPThegoddamnedBAND).