Fat Dog are tired, but they haven’t lost their bark
Photo credit: Emma Toma
On their second album Cancel Me (I’m Tired), the South London band push their chaotic beginnings into something bigger and surprisingly personal. Chris Hughes talks finding bandmates online, stadium shows, emotional honesty and why a Fat Dog song isn’t real until they play it live.
Fat Dog might be one of the few bands whose origin story can be accurately described as Facebook Marketplace. The South London outfit are now inciting pandemonium at festivals, touring internationally, and have a new album that has a ton of bite. Initially, it all started with Joe Love, alone during lockdown, performing what bandmate Chris Hughes remembers as “weird William Shatner-style gigs”: Love sitting on a stool, singing over backing tracks. Eventually, solitude got old.
“He decided, ‘Man, I’m getting lonely on this stage,’ so he started searching around for people,” Hughes remembers. “I was just a fan at the gigs and I came down and did an audition.” There is even a lyric on Fat Dog’s new album about finding your friends on Facebook Marketplace. “Which is basically true.”
Depending on the night, somewhere between five and seven people now occupy the stage. What began as Love’s peculiar solo experiment gradually mutated into one of Britain’s most exhilarating live bands, though Hughes says it was difficult to recognise the transformation while they were inside it. At early shows at The Windmill in Brixton, Love seemingly declared every gig an important one because “the labels are coming down.” Success arrived more like suddenly noticing you’ve grown taller than as one defining breakthrough moment.
There are, however, certain situations that make growth difficult to ignore. Supporting Foo Fighters in stadiums this summer was one of them. “Oh yeah, we’re playing stadiums now,” Hughes remembers thinking. But rather than amplifying the intensity Fat Dog thrive upon, the enormous venues could feel strangely detached. As the first band onstage, Hughes knew most of the audience had come for somebody else, while the physical distance between performer and crowd turned thousands of people into what he describes as a “sea of faces.”
That distance is particularly unnatural for Fat Dog. Audience reaction is fundamental to how they understand their music. “The difference between feeling a gig was, like, all right and really good is how the audience reacts,” Hughes says.
Photo credit: Emma Toma
Their forthcoming second album, Cancel Me (I’m Tired), due October 2 via Domino, expands that relationship between chaotic control. Following their 2024 debut WOOF., the ten-track record still possesses the dancefloor urgency that made Fat Dog such a compelling proposition in the first place, but its world has widened: strings masterfully intersect with electronics, edging a rave without forgetting an element of psychedelia, and cinematic grandeur with flashes of country and rock'n'roll.
“The first album was more like, we want people to dance,” Hughes explains. This time, with Love again writing the music and lyrics, there was “an attempt at getting something slightly more personal out.” Chris further elaborates, “That’s why there’s a kind of more intense lyricism to this album,” he continues. “Maybe it’s not just all, like, head-banging music. It is just an attempt at doing something which doesn’t come naturally to the British, which is, like, showing some emotion.”
There wasn't much time to agonise over that evolution. According to Hughes, the band returned from an exhausting American tour with the request for another album in three months. Hughes escaped to Nova Scotia for a month; Love went in essentially the opposite direction. “Joe got home. I think he had, like, six hours off, went to the pub, and then went to the studio,” Hughes says. “And that was that.”
If Cancel Me (I’m Tired) sounds like an appropriate title for that lifestyle, that's because it practically emerged from it. The phrase became a running joke while the band were crammed into a van driving through California, spending seven-hour stretches together in oppressive heat. Eventually, looking across the van at another person and saying “Cancel me. I’m tired” became shorthand for having absolutely nothing left.
It also became a way to poke at the broader world surrounding them. Hughes describes the title as deliberately “rage-baity,” its attitude resembling a movie character responding to someone holding a gun to their head by daring them to pull the trigger.
“I have no more fucks left to give,” he says of its sentiment. “Just do it.”
That combination of exhaustion, humour and melodrama runs throughout Fat Dog's life. On “Aliens,” the band arrive at a spectacularly disproportionate insult: telling someone they are personally responsible for humanity having never encountered extraterrestrial life. Hughes connects its bitter humour to John Lennon’s famously cutting “How Do You Sleep?”.
Musically, meanwhile, Fat Dog have deliberately made their sound larger. Hughes points to Ennio Morricone and film soundtracks as recurring influences. Where WOOF. leaned heavily electronic, Cancel Me (I’m Tired) brings significantly more live instrumentation and strings into the equation. The genre-hopping is partly artistic curiosity and partly self-preservation. By the time WOOF. finally arrived, some of its songs had been in Fat Dog's repertoire for years.
“If I hear, like, the first two bars of ‘King of the Slugs,’ my fucking heart rate goes up,” Hughes jokes. Exploring new sounds gives the band new places to go—not only on this album, but on whatever follows it because ultimately, the destination for a Fat Dog song remains the stage.
“Doing it in a studio is just preparation for doing it live,” Hughes says. “A song almost doesn’t feel real till you’ve played it in front of people.” Much of their current set is already drawn from Cancel Me (I’m Tired), with Hughes singling out “Shit Love” as a favourite. He remembers watching Love's entire body tense before unleashing its scream the first time they performed it. His reaction was simple: “Yeah, this is awesome.”
And if you ever doubted that humour persisted in Fat Dog's decision, think about the way the band is anchored by a running joke they may never escape. WOOF. was followed by an album whose cover depicts an overexposed, angel-winged dog ascending toward some imagined heaven. Hughes admits they might finally have exhausted the bit.
“We must really try and get this dog thing done with,” he laughs. “Everything we do is about dogs.” Fat Dog itself was almost called Love Palace—Joe Love likes Crystal Palace—but the eventual name won for the uncomplicated reason that Love likes fat dogs. Hughes has since developed a more philosophical interpretation: “We’re a lot like fat dogs because we’re entertaining, but at the same time also a little bit sad.”
That description might accidentally capture Cancel Me (I’m Tired) better than anything else. Fat Dog are funnier, sadder, stranger and more entertaining than they were on WOOF., even as the machine surrounding them accelerates.
For now, they're touring, learning how to write together more and becoming, in Hughes' words, “more professional,” despite a “benevolent dictatorship” under Love keeping things moving. After their remaining dates this year, Hughes hopes Fat Dog will return to the United States and Canada in 2027.
Or perhaps they'll abandon it all for their other great ambition: opening a cider brewery in Devon.
They already have the name, says Chris: “Grumpy Dog Cider.”
