PUP
Who Will Look After The Dogs?
Release Date: May 2, 2025
Genre(s): Punk, Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Pop Punk
Record label: Rise Records
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Who Will Look After The Dogs? from Amazon
Album Review: Who Will Look After The Dogs? by PUP
Very Good, Based on 5 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
The album goes from zero to 100 fast, opening with the explosive and deliciously brittle "No Hope," a song that sets the stage for the themes of the record. "I don't need her / It's killing me," Babcock shouts in an anthemic chorus designed for stadium singalongs. The track cuts out with a steadily increasing wall of sound, a production note that is repeated throughout the record and underscores John Congleton's infamous indie cred.
Based on rating 7/10
Veering into more introspective territory, it confronted the pressures of being a band for nearly a decade. It also chose to explore new, more bare sonics from the Canadian punksters, with the intention of highlighting how exasperated they were with everything. Returning with a triumphant resolve, on PUP's fifth outing - Who Will Look After The Dogs? - they re-join the fraying cacophony with a more driven focus.
Based on rating 3.3/5
PUP inch closer to their Old Yeller phase - it's the realest they've sounded in years. It's probably helpful to view PUP as victims of their own success, with 2016's The Dream is Over and 2019's Morbid Stuff laying down a combined gold standard in caustic-mouthed, technically adroit pop punk that few, including PUP themselves, have managed to lay a finger on since; it's definitely helpful to view frontman Stefan Babcock as a victim of his own self-loathing, neurotic complacency, and the band's latest full-length Who Will Look After the Dogs? depends on this sympathetic appeal like never before. From top to tail, this album sounds so heartbreakingly self-weary that its status as the fifth(!) PUP record sits like some impossible milestone rather than the single-digit happenstance it probably should be.
Opinion: Excellent
PUP may appear to be a tried-and-tested pop-punk band at first listen - but clearly, not everything is what it seems. While 'No Hope' comes out of the gate swinging, there's a brooding nature to this version of the quartet - like a sunny day threatened by an impending thunderstorm - in which their fifth full-length 'Who Will Look After The Dogs?' challenges the listener's assumptions of what a punk record is today. A record that tugs at the heartstrings, PUP leap and bound through fields of melancholy, finding balance between bittersweet lyrical tales, upbeat pop-punk foundations, and lingering emo influences.
Opinion: Great
Author rating: /10.
'Who Will Look After The Dogs?'
is available now