The lead singer and songwriter of punk group PUP talks about the band’s new album, getting older, touring, and the influence of the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn.
In The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, when Don Quixote affirms for Sancho Panza the truth of the proverb, “Where one door shuts, another opens,” he is steeling himself for a more exciting adventure than the exploits that did not materialize or resulted in setbacks. In the character of Quixote, Cervantes creates a figure who will not give up, who is his own hype man, committed to his chosen ideals, and more than a little mad.
A cynical spin on that saying about doors closing appears in “Hallways”, from PUP’s new album Who Will Look After the Dogs?, illustrating that even a hard-charging punk band can recognize the limits of a quixotic approach to life in the face of break-ups, aging, and other events that signal a loss of control: “‘Cause when one door closes / it might never open / there might be no other doors.”
“Totally Fine”, the final single from the band’s outstanding 2022 album The Unraveling of PUPTheBand, already articulated the thin line between life and death, victory and defeat, being at one’s worst or totally fine, suggesting that, with a sufficiently resigned attitude, those dichotomies might not matter. Revisiting PUP’s discography reveals fatalism as a regular feature, if not a guiding philosophy of the songs. PUP’s music has often served as a counterweight to the lyrics, offering memorable melodies, gang vocals, and ironic compositional elements that mitigate the isolation and harshness of the songs’ narratives.
The Unraveling of PUPTheBand was a concept album that imagined these disparate elements and skilled musicians at the mercy of a corporate mindset, complete with a board of directors. The instrumental palette was also considerably expanded, resulting in what the group’s lead singer and songwriter, Stefan Babcock, calls a “maximalist” work. Indeed, The Unraveling of PUPTheBand is something like the group’s Sophtware Slump, though not as revered within their discography for whatever reason.
We begin this conversation about Who Will Look After the Dogs? discussing what Babcock thinks connects that album to PUP’s latest, both in content and in the band’s process of creating it. He says, “I think you’re in the minority of people who say that they really like the last one. I’ll be honest. I also love it. We made The Unraveling of PUPTheBand during COVID, and we were just stuck in this house for six weeks together, making this record.
“We had all this time, and we had all this creative energy, and we wanted to make the PUP version of a maximalist album, which is not a maximalist album for most people, but for us it was. That’s what it was, and we took it to a lot of different places, some of which were well-received and others which weren’t. It was a weird record to make because we were really kind of locked up together, going crazy and working on it night and day, no days off, not leaving the house.”
Babcock points out that, by contrast, Who Will Look After the Dogs? is an attempt “to almost do the opposite: to make a record with very few overdubs that really sounded like the best version of the four of us playing in a room together”. As for what The Unraveling contributed to the band moving forward, he says, “I think we gained a lot. I played piano for the first time in my life, and we had a saxophone on it. We experimented with all this stuff and learned a lot from the experience, but when you spend that much time beating songs to death, it’s really hard to keep the excitement and the spark that made them special.”
“So, on this record,” he explains, “We just wanted to preserve that excitement that we feel in the room together when we’re first writing a song and preserve, like, the love and the spark for these songs, and just make a record and not worry about it being perfect, and we’re all proud of the record. It’s an imperfect, scrappy record that I am so proud of. I mean, I think it’s some of our best songs, and we really did capture this, the spirit of this band and the spirit of our live energy, and the joy that we feel together and the conflict that we feel together.”
Since joy and conflict are a good way to describe the chaotic brew of PUP’s songs, with each force threatening to spill over into the other, I ask Babcock if he thinks some listeners might be too focused on one of these elements to appreciate the other. That is, might the abrasiveness of the lyrics and some of the production make it difficult for casual listeners to sense the fun? “Maybe,” he answers. “There are many casual fans who maybe don’t dig in that deep, and that’s also fine.”
“But,” he continues, “I think if you’re a pretty deep listener to PUP, those people appreciate the fact that these songs are dark and coming from a tough place, but it’s also a celebration of life in a way. We take these dark subjects, and then the four of us try to have fun with them. The only way I’m capable of dealing with life is to laugh at it, and it’s such an amazing thing about this band for me. This band has been so good for my soul, being able to take these dark things and have fun with my friends, creating something hopefully positive out of it.”
PUP’s music videos often emphasize the humor and heart of the band. Babcock describes their music video creator and “fifth member”, Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux, as a “genius” with “this incredible storytelling ability and [able] to do it in wild ways like that ‘Paranoid’ video, a practical lyric video that’s mostly done in one shot. [It’s] mental that he could pull that off, and I’ve never seen anything like that before. So much work went into it.” The music video for “Paranoid” provides another variation of the wild energy of a PUP live show, previously sent up in a violently darkly comic way in the video for “Reservoir”, a single from their debut album.
For a period in the group’s earlier days, the singer says, the intense environment of their live shows impinged on the positivity. He describes these shows as “really violent, maybe not by hardcore band standards, but by our standards. It’s pretty violent, and that has not been the case for the last six, seven years. People are going hard, but it’s all smiles, and I think people feel really safe at our shows, and it feels like community. There’s just so much positivity coming out of these songs about the burning world, you know.”
Babcock’s emphasis on his band’s joy, community, and positivity brings to mind the joy-focused Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. While PUP’s pop-punk musical lineage includes everything from popular acts like Weezer to lesser-known acts like Ovens, Babcock’s spoken-singing style on several songs resembles Finn’s characteristic delivery. Given these resonances, I ask him whether Finn is a conscious influence or at least a figure he appreciates.
“I do love the Hold Steady, he says. “I love Craig’s solo stuff, too. I saw him play two weeks ago. He was great. He’s one of the best lyricists, I think, of our generation. I do know him, so I hope that if he does read this, he takes this the right way, but he has taught my generation of songwriters that being the best singer is not as important as writing great lyrics and delivering those lyrics with absolute conviction. He is the best in the world at that. His songs are incredibly musical, yet the most important parts are the lyrics, delivery, and the feeling they give you.
“We’ve adopted that into our band, not just with lyrics and vocals, but with everything. That is the thesis of this new record. The most important thing is, ‘Did that feel good? Does the song feel good? Does the song have a spark? The take that we chose? Does that feel good? Does it have magic?’ Because you can play things perfectly, and they can be soulless.”
Who Will Look After the Dogs? sees PUP veering back after the maximalist/conceptual departure that was The Unraveling, but their adherence to the thesis Babcock lays out yields so many memorable moments, with the always-strong rhythm section (drummer Zack Mykula and bassist Nestor Chumak) dynamic as ever and guitar solos (Steve Sladkowski) that sometimes go rogue in the best way possible. Unlike so many other groups, PUP stand out for not using quantization or other tools that might create a more optimized product.
“We’re not a quantized band,” Babcock confirms confidently, “not even on our maximalist records. Even our ‘perfection’ records are sloppy as hell. But no, I mean, there is some magic. You pointed out guitar solos… there’s some magic on some of these solos that Steve rips on this record that are more magical than anything he’s done in the past. I think we are guilty of pushing each other to be better and to be perfect. If, in the past, Steve didn’t nail a solo, like something was off, we’d go back, and we’d try to do it again and do it again and do it again, and we just let him cook on this one.
“Also, when he was like, ‘I kind of messed it up’, we would be like, ‘You messed it up perfectly.’ Some of the solos on this record, like I’m thinking of, like a song called ‘Cruel’ and a song called ‘Hunger for Death’, are two of my favorite Steve solos, five records deep. Those are my two favorite solos he’s done so, yeah, proud of him. [I’m] proud of everybody on this record for letting things go off the rails just the right amount.”
“Hunger for Death” is an outlier on Who Will Look After the Dogs?, which begins like a specter of a pop song from the 1950s or 1960s, propping up a doubting, misanthropic narrator who doesn’t forget to indict himself as he dismisses everyone around him. “That was an interesting song,” Babcock observes, “because we arranged it in a much more normal PUP way and played it a year before we made this record. It just didn’t feel right, and we tore it apart and redid it, and it didn’t feel right, and when we went into the studio, we were like, ‘That song wasn’t even on our list.’ It wasn’t on our radar. It was straight in the garbage.”
Later, though, “on maybe the last day or the second last day” of recording, Babcock recalls, “it was the last song we recorded. We decided to just give it a try. I had this different idea of the arrangement in my head, of just stripping it way down and then punching it really hard, like, you know, with the back half of the song. So we just gave it a shot, and it felt really good. The front half is like an old drum machine. I’m not sure. I don’t want to misspeak. It’s a drum machine that John Congleton, who produced the record, had lying around, and there’s a Farfisa on it.
“It’s a really weird combination of instruments, especially for this record. It’s one of the only songs that has anything other than drums, guitar, bass, and vocals. Sonically, it’s placed right in the middle of the record as a, ‘Let’s take a second here.’ Yeah. I really love that song. I think it’s pretty magical. I don’t think it’s a single because it’s not really representative of the rest of the record, but I do think it’s got the same kind of sloppy, weird charm that the rest of the album has, just presented in a different context, in a different way. So spiritually, I think it fits perfectly on the record.”
When I bring up the phrase about closing and opening doors on “Hallways”, which, like “Hunger for Death”, provides a central part of the album’s lyrical concerns (and, indeed, its title), Babcock explains his choice to incorporate “a phrase that we all know” into the chorus: “You know, ‘when one door closes, another one opens.’ I think I was moving through life. I was in a pretty bleak place, writing that, as you can probably tell from the song, but I think I was just in this place where it’s like, maybe as you get older, doors just close and nothing else opens. I just felt like the opportunities and paths my life could have taken were kind of closing off. I had imagined this whole future with this person [and] just got the rug pulled out, and that door is just closed.”
As an album coming to terms with breaking up, Who Will Look After the Dogs? is a (much) rowdier version of the territory Beck covered on Sea Change or Islands with A Sleep & A Forgetting (which, coincidentally, also featured a song called “Hallways.”) However, the encompassing theme is maturation, which Babcock likens to a narrowing of options or clarity about one’s choices: “Maybe as you get older, life just becomes a long, Severance-style hallway. You know, where you’ve made your choices, and choices have been made for you, and you’re on a path. Whether you intended to be on that or not, you know, that is part of growing up, is accepting that, ‘Here I am. This is the path I’m on, and I’m just gonna do the best with what I got.’”
One critical part of Babcock’s approach to lyric writing is his use of quotations attributed to other characters within the narratives or representing his thoughts or spoken words he regrets. This feature is not always noticeable unless one is reading the lyric sheet. Still, it contributes to various perspectives within the songs or an accountability or check on the character he embodies. While he says he does not set out to use that technique when writing each album, he is motivated to avoid becoming too inward-looking.
He explains, “I think songs can get kind of one-dimensional if you’re just talking about yourself, and especially, you know, if you’re the kind of lyricist that does write mostly from a personal place. You know, we were talking about Craig Finn earlier. He’s an incredible storyteller. I’m sure a lot of his songs are about him, but many of his songs are about characters he’s made up or people he’s met, and I don’t do as much of that.
“Ninety percent of PUP songs are about me and things I’ve experienced. That can get boring as hell to write about, especially if it’s just from my perspective. Also, I don’t know if this is true, but I like to think of myself as an empathetic individual who understands that, even if I’m pissed off about something, there’s always a different side to it, and just because I write songs shouldn’t mean that I just get to rewrite my version of history.”
Now embarking on a tour for Who Will Look After the Dogs?, PUP will play shows in the UK before heading elsewhere in Europe and onto Australasia, with North American tour dates scheduled through the fall. Babcock points out that the group has “so many shows between now and 2026 that we haven’t even announced all the tours.” As for how he feels about preparing for another round of extensive touring, he says, “We’re doing so much. I’m really excited. I’m nervous but excited. I’m nervous because touring can be taxing on the brain. But it’s also just really fun and rewarding.
“As we were talking about before, the sense of community around PUP has just gotten stronger and stronger over the years, and I’ve noticed more ‘outsiders’ at our shows, which makes me so happy. That so many people of different walks of life can feel comfortable at our shows and watching that community grow, both in terms of size, but more in terms of like…I’m struggling to find the right words. But the community growing stronger, taking care of each other, and getting bigger and more inclusive has been really one of the most rewarding parts about being in this band, and so I’m excited to go out and experience that.”
Babcock says he is particularly excited about the North American tour with Jeff Rosenstock (a guest on “Get Dumber”), one of his and the group’s best friends. “I’m excited to spend a month with him and all the wonderful people in his band.” Of the potential toll that a tour takes, he says, “I’m doing my best to just really have fun and enjoy it, which can be a struggle for me because of the mental health stuff that I have and how much it’s exacerbated on tour.
“But I’m really trying to be grateful for the opportunity and enjoy it, and I can’t wait to play these new songs and hopefully have people screaming the lyrics back in our faces. It’s a feeling unlike any other, and I’m always nervous that it’s not gonna happen when we put out a new record, but always, somehow, the records seem to find their way into the hands of people who will appreciate them. So, fingers crossed that is going to happen again.”