The most honest tantrum of the year.
There is a very particular gesture in putting on your record Cancel Me (I’m Tired). It is not anger, it is not pure provocation, it is not the defiant “cancel me” of someone who wants to fight. It’s something crazier and more human: the tiredness of existing in an era that asks you to have an opinion on everything, to be available all the time, to react to everything. Fat Dog He grabbed that exhaustion, that background noise of contemporary life, and instead of going to sleep, he threw a party. That contradiction (being melted and still not being able to stop moving) is the heart of their second album.
South London and its machinery
It is convenient to locate them. Fat Dog came from the same South London broth that gave us shameto black midito Goat Girl: that scene where post punk stopped being a genre to become an attitude, a permission to grab guitars, synthesizers and whatever comes your way. His debut, WOOF. (2024), presented them as a wild live band, one of those that one sees before listening, of mosh pit and beer flying. The risk of these types of bands is always the same: that the album is only the shadow of the show, that the energy does not survive the recording.
Cancel Me (I’m Tired) is the answer of Fat Dog to that trap. And the answer is tricky in its own way: instead of trying to bottle the chaos of the living, they dismantle it and put it back together with more pieces. Dance-punk, rave, darkwave, eighties pop, psychedelia, even some spaghetti western: everything fits, often within the same song.
The discomfort of not knowing what’s next
Listening to this album in a row feels like putting it on shuffle even though it isn’t. You go from a furious start to a luminous synth-pop turn without transition, without warning, without the courtesy of preparation. At first it is disconcerting. And there is the most interesting decision on the album: Fat Dog He doesn’t want you to feel comfortable. He wants to reproduce, in the form of the album, that sensation of infinite scroll where a tragedy coexists with a meme coexists with an advertisement. The disorder is not carelessness: it is the issue.
What sustains everything is the voice of Joe Lovewhich functions more as a rhythmic instrument than as a narrator. Their words arrive like percussion before you understand what they are saying, and when you finally decipher them, they often point to something dark hidden beneath the joke. It’s an old device (humor as a shield for vulnerability), but here it is used with an intuition that prevents the album from taking itself too seriously.
Where the speed drops
The album reveals itself in its pauses. When Fat Dog He turns off the machines and allows himself to breathe, a band appears that hides more melody than their reputation for being busted lets on. They are brief moments, oases between the download, but they are what reveal that behind the chaos there are people thinking about the song, not just the impact.
And that’s where Cancel Me (I’m Tired) separates itself from its own debut. WOOF. It was pure muscle; This album has an emotional warmth beneath the noise that would have been unthinkable before. The band learned that a gear lever is used to go down, not just to accelerate. That you can be a party band without just being a party band.
Tiredness is not surrender
In the end, the title is intentionally misleading. Cancel Me (I’m Tired) It seems like a white flag and it’s exactly the opposite: an album made by an exhausted band that turns exhaustion into fuel. Fat Dog It was born from the desire to explode when the pandemic did not allow it, and that urgency is still intact, only now it is accompanied by craft, by melody, by a maturity that did not take away their edge.
It is not a perfect album nor does it want to be; its disorder sometimes overwhelms and not all the pieces land. But it is one of the most lively albums of the year, one that understands contemporary fatigue better than a thousand solemn songs on the subject, and that chooses, against all odds, to continue dancing. Being tired, it turns out, was never an excuse to sit still.
