After seven years of relative silence and 13 years of being a band, Dog Chocolate have returned with their fourth album ‘So Inspired, So Done In,’ arriving February 27 on Upset The Rhythm. While many of the 16 songs barely make it past the three-minute mark, each one bursts with all the textures and colours of an office cupboard full of old sweets, fluorescent markers, and multiple ways to fix paper together. The band shares new single “Green Stuff,” a scrappy pop-punk song with individual verses written by Matthew, Rob, and Andrew. Matthew explains that the song’s lyrical theme “stemmed from the idea that while humans continually slather concrete and tarmac over habitats, nature always finds a way to reclaim them when left unattended. This echoed with the brewing unrest of nation states trying to aggressively take what is not theirs. It felt like an interesting comparison.” In his verse, Rob challenges the metaphor of a war between plants and humans used in the song and imagines a “mutual aid between our tree and flower comrades.” “Green Stuff” describes cycles of growth, decay, impermanence, and how all this, in Andrew’s lyrical description, is “bonkers and exquisite.”
The accompanying video was filmed last summer in the garden at Andrew’s Mum’s empty house, where nature had truly taken over. He shares, “Thorny creepers stretching the length of the patio, weeds coming up through every crack, standing waist height and feeding Cinnabar Moth caterpillars. Tall grass meshing with low hanging bushes, flowers, leaves, buds etc, at all stages of life and death… I sellotaped a 40x magnifier loupe to my phone’s camera and got in amongst it.” ‘So Inspired, So Done In’ sees Dog Chocolate tackling subject matter as diverse as overheard conversations, healing fungal toenails, the Rogerian concept of the Actualising Tendency, bronze age living conditions, dreaming songs into being, and human-plant relations. Work and anti-work is a recurring theme, as is artistic inspiration and burnout. Recorded and mixed by POZI’s Toby Burroughs and mastered by Sofia Lopes, the album charts a long and confusing period in the band’s collective life, marked by major life changes, losses, and shifts, colouring the band’s trademark frantic, daft, and anxious energy with a contemplative glaze. After the pandemic, some of the band’s members moved to different cities, got new jobs, some had babies, some encountered bereavement, making it harder to practice and play together. The band found a way to keep their friendship and creativity going through making a monthly radio show “The CDRs Won’t Last,” initially chronicling the lost music of the Myspace era but becoming a fun place to chat and play songs to each other. These life changes influenced the way the songs came together, written in bedrooms, over the internet, and in a large shed in Shropshire for a weekend writing get-together.
Tracklist:
Infinite Nuggets
Fun is Always Brilliant
Employee
Springfield Library Haunting
Drumming on a Tree with FM
Potatoes in the Basement Bin
Fungal Free 2023
Green Stuff
Architecture Days
Munchies and a Pen
Guildford Awkward
No Pavement Story
Worst Jobs in History
Unfinished Rock ‘N’ Roll Tattoo
A Bit of Paper
So Inspired, So Done In