A Good Day in May
A review of Who Will Look After the Dogs? by PUP and The Scholars by Car Seat Headrest
It’s 6am on Friday 2nd May 2025. Having gone to bed at midnight, disappointed when double checking whether the US was behind or ahead of us in time difference, I’m groggy and elated all at the same time. There, sitting in my Bandcamp app, are new records from two of my favourite bands.
PUP’s Who Will Look After the Dogs? and Car Seat Headrest’s The Scholars had both arrived first thing, dragging me out of a fugue. I’d already heard a few tracks from each and had attended an online listening party for The Scholars the night before. Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo had introduced the record and then each track, giving the listener more details about the complex narrative behind each moment in the heavy concept album. Their take on a rock opera, the album takes its inspiration from everything ranging from the characters of early Bowie to Mozart. It focuses on different communities all circling a fictional place: Parnassus University. A local liberal arts university, framed in a variety of loose and slippery tensions, even the first listen with its introductions had me googling alongside it and writing down the names of different characters to remember.
It’s a record that oscillates in many ways: in time, in setting, perspective, sonically and even materially in the interaction you have with it as an object. The booklet that comes with the physical album, Toledo has said, heightens the experience and contextualises it in a way that the digital alone cannot.
Who Will Look After the Dogs? on the other hand feels to be an intensely specific and unified record. When I first heard the singles, the whiplash from tracks like Paranoid and Getting Dumber to the second single Hallways left me feeling confused about what the sound of the record as a whole would be. Hallways felt like PUP at their peak, reminding me of Morbid Stuff and The Unravelling of PUPTheBand, records that combine scuzziness, speed and punk with a playfulness and narrative that lends a slightly more polished air. I’m loathe to use the word ‘polished’ as its one so readily attributed to punk to shoehorn in ‘pop’ as an attributive, but the sound, especially on Unravelling, is deliberately more produced than those earlier records.
So what was this one going to be? The early Wavves vibe of static feedback and fuzzy sound, of spontaneity and DIY recording? Or an album that would combine tongue-in-cheek lyrics hinting at a vulnerability without risking being overly earnest? Turns out both. And it’s excellent. The record doesn’t jump between these two modes but achieves them simultaneously throughout. What the album does so well is hinge on something singular and simple: heartbreak. There’s honesty in the lyrics that is somehow intensified the more deadpan its delivery becomes. In Hunger for Death, lyricist Stefan Babcock croaks in an almost-whisper over a drum machine and strings (originally composed on a Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer) ‘fuck everyone on this planet, except for you’. Devastation, wrapped in fun and straightforwardness, is what the band have done so well throughout their career and why this record feels like the apex of what they do best.
The Scholars is an album naturally at the height of a trajectory, showing a mature and complicated sonic, lyrical and instrumental development. The band’s earlier records are predominantly by Toledo but this one was far more experimental and collaborative in how it was made. Even from the point of view of song length, the band has grown, the longest one on the record being 18 minutes 52 seconds.
Who Will Look After the Dogs? on the other hand achieves something remarkable where if you stumbled across it you might be forgiven for thinking it was a record from a band striking a masterpiece early in their career. That’s by no means an insult. The record is certainly not immature or lacking the cohesion that comes later in a band’s experience. But it’s raw and has a deliberate naivety to the way it was recorded. For fans of the band, it truly shines in its intention when viewed within their whole oeuvre. Looking at the shift from The Unravelling of PUPTheBand to this shows just how deliberately they stripped things back. In fact, the lack of repeated takes when recording speaks to a band so cemented in their trust and connection to one another, they can produce something incredible in just one or two takes.
Despite this, the pacing and order still feels deliberate and carefully curated, managing to hold those two modes simultaneously because of where those more obviously spontaneous tracks sit. Get Dumber comes before Hunger for Death, the latter feeling like an emotional crash, mimicking the waves of grief it portrays in the lyrics. But it's not angry one minute, sad the next, it's that genius of having sad lyrics in a song that's loud and raucous, a goofy and funny track like Olive Garden communicating despondency in a more honest way. Stefan said of the record that it was about taking those really dark feelings and making himself laugh. It's pretty rare that you can call an album funny and daft and both of those things be a huge compliment; it is here.
Toledo said of The Scholars that, despite it having a unifying narrative, he didn't want the album to rely too heavily on its story and structure, wanting each song to act as a great song in its own right. For the most part they succeed, the most enjoyable way to listen to the record initially being to let it wash over you a little without getting too caught up with following the story.
The strongest moments are where it comes closest to the genre it's playing with. It sounds most like Car Seat Headrest doing a rock opera in the Americana of tracks like CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You), Devereux and True False Lover. This last track kind of saves the record for me as, without the punctuation of Gethsemane, the first single released, it starts to taper a little in its quieter moments like Equals and Reality. These are when it's hardest to view each song standalone and feels like potentially the dedication to a narrative takes over.
PUP’s record, unified by the story of a feeling and capturing an emotional moment, isn’t wedded to structure in terms of narrative. So, where it might not have made sense at first through its singles, it suddenly snaps into place as a whole.
The two records are doing something completely different but they both feel like they achieve a similar thing for a listener and a fan. These are two bands really flaunting and playing with what they do best. With Who Will Look After the Dogs?, it's an absolute joy to hear a band consciously divert to the raw material and foundations of what makes them tick whilst also pushing their sound, and their catalogue, further. It's some sort of magic trick that the album can feel so mature, and make so much sense as the band's fifth record, and still sound almost innocent in its stripped back sound.
Though, in a lot of ways, these records sound very different, they both speak to the kind of music that can come when a band really knows and trusts each other. Both took risks, tried new things, Car Seat Headrest playing with their own lore in the same way PUP have with their own sound. That means they trust the fans as well as each other, hopefully knowing that it would pay off and make us all pretty fucking happy to listen.
If you can, buy these records in physical form! If you have no space for records because you buy too many books it’s pretty affordable to buy the albums digitally! And then they’re actually yours.
80-85% of the money goes directly to the bands when you buy through Bandcamp. You can find their fair trade music policy here for more info. All forms available from PUP’s Bandcamp here and Car Seat Headrest’s Bandcamp here.