Album review
Fat Dog performing at Rock en Seine in 2025. Photo: ManoSolo13241324/Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Most bands use exhaustion as a reason to slow down. Fat Dog have made it sound like something that should be chased through traffic.
The south London group’s second album, Cancel Me (I’m Tired), arrives after the long, sweaty afterlife of its 2024 debut, WOOF. The title suggests collapse. The music keeps refusing it.
Across ten tracks, Fat Dog moves through rave, punk, electro-pop, psychedelia, metallic guitar and a brief country detour with the confidence of people who have confused genre with furniture. Everything can be moved. Nothing has to stay where it was found.
Tired faster
“Smile and Wave” opens like instructions issued during a disaster. “Go Fuck Urself” heads toward the club. The title track finds a groove inside the fatigue and keeps tightening it. Fat Dog’s trick is not simply to combine sounds that ought to fight. Plenty of bands do that. The trick is to make the collision feel like the song’s natural habitat.
The first record established the band as a live proposition, the kind of act whose reputation arrives in verbs: surge, lurch, erupt, detonate. The second has a harder assignment. A frenzy repeated becomes a brand. Cancel Me (I’m Tired) works because Fat Dog introduces structure without cleaning anything up.
“Heart of Darkness” is surprisingly pop-minded. “Snakes” takes the record somewhere stranger, letting country color into a sound that usually behaves as if it has been locked overnight in a nightclub. “Bad Dog” accelerates until speed itself becomes comic. By the time “Aliens” arrives, the album has begun to reveal how sentimental this supposedly feral band can be.
Frontman Joe Love has said the new material puts more emphasis on words. That shift matters because Fat Dog’s music can easily become its own distraction. The songs refer to addiction, family, love, technology and exhaustion, along with the sort of ridiculous cultural clutter that makes modern life feel less like a coherent experience than a browser with forty tabs open.
The joke
Fat Dog is funny, but not because it is making comedy records. The humor comes from scale. A small irritation receives orchestral punishment. A stupid phrase is treated like a prophecy. The band understands that contemporary exhaustion has become melodramatic because there is no dignified way to describe being overworked, overstimulated and still expected to post about it.
The album title is therefore less a plea than a dare. Cancellation promises stillness. Fat Dog responds by producing more noise. The contradiction is not resolved because the contradiction is the condition: tired people keep moving.
There are moments when the record’s appetite becomes tiring in exactly the way advertised. Ten tracks of constant invention can begin to feel like being buttonholed by the most energetic person at a party. But the fatigue is useful. A Fat Dog album should probably leave the listener wanting a chair.
The achievement of Cancel Me (I’m Tired) is that the band has found room to grow without becoming respectable. The songs are clearer, the ideas broader, the chaos more deliberate. Fat Dog has learned how to control the mess without allowing anyone to notice the control.
