PUP Embrace Their Imperfections

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After 15 years as a band, you would think that PUP has its shit together. But for the Toronto band, the chaos is not only part of the appeal, it’s integral to their story. Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski have made a living fighting with each other while churning out explosive, hotwired pop-punk albums. They’ve built an arsenal of singalong bangers, like “Kids,” “DVP,” “Waiting,” and “Reservoir.” Their songs are neurotic, funny, and nihilistic, with a hint of self-deprecation and middle fingers—as if to say, “Yeah, we’re fucked up, but we’re no more fucked up than you.”

PUP’s last album, 2022’s THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, was their most bombastic and colorful yet (I mean, just look at that ridiculous cover art), in which the band imagined themselves as a corporate entity, wondering out-loud: What would it be like to press the self-destruct button on an entire enterprise? The thing is, they’ve had their hands all over that self-destruct button since 2010.

A decade ago, on The Dream is Over, PUP could barely stand the sight of each other, singing together (or, at each other) in perfect harmony on the opening track: “If this tour doesn’t kill you, then I will. I hate your guts and it makes me ill seeing your face every morning.” It’s shocking that PUP hasn’t fully imploded by now. But the band lives on and their fifth album, Who Will Look After the Dogs?—a phrase Babcock wrote down during a post-breakup hell in 2022—is them at their most earnest and imperfect.

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When I meet with Babcock in April over Zoom, he’s a bit jittery about things picking up again. For the better part of a year following the UNRAVELING tours, he spent his time alone in a cabin in Northern Canada, isolated from friends and family, with nothing to do but listen to hockey podcasts and write songs. “I was living in a house without another person for the first time in my whole life, living completely on my own for the first time in my whole life,” he reflects. “I used songwriting as a way to keep me on track. I was writing more than I had ever written in my whole life, and I was feeling good about what I was writing every day, which is not normal for me.”

One of the first songs to come out of this songwriting stupor was “Hallways,” which might be Babcock’s most vulnerable breakup song yet: He’s collapsed on his living room floor, alone and in despair, not knowing what to do next. “I’m losing the will to keep dragging on,” he sings. “But I can’t die yet, ‘cause who will look after the dog?” Usually, lines like that in a PUP song are delivered with a wink, but “Hallways” is the first time the listener’s concerns for Babcock’s well-being might hold water. But he assures me that, while things were bleak, he used songwriting as a way to keep himself on track—to get up off the floor. Instead of drowning in the worst year of his life, he says, he felt energized from writing alone.

Babcock claims to have written nearly 30 songs during that self-imposed exile, most of which were destined for a new PUP record down the line. The band then got together and whittled the number down to 12, because, as Babcock says, they’re “not the kind of band to make a double record.” (Although, I can’t help but imagine what PUP’s “White Album” would sound like.) They recorded Who Will Look After the Dogs? in early 2024 in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton, who pushed the band to not only work faster, but to put more trust in each other more than ever before. In the press release for the record, PUP say it was the happiest they’ve ever been in the studio: “They had fun this time, [they] swear!” When I repeat that line to Babcock, he puts his hands up and cuts me off, saying “fun” might be a bit of a stretch. ”Let’s relax a little bit.”

According to him, being in a band isn’t always fun, and writing and recording new music isn’t a pleasurable act in PUP’s case. They argue about chord changes, song arrangements, band members’ mannerisms, the way they’re breathing—that’s what happens when you’ve been in a group so intimately with your best friends for 15 years. “It’s a brotherhood,” Babcock says, “and we know how to push each other’s buttons.” Part of the issue, too, is the amount of pressure the musicians put on themselves to make the band—and the songs—the best it can be. They’re perfectionists and overthinkers, and getting at each other’s throats every once and awhile is just part of the deal.

“Anyone who tells you that they don’t give a shit what people think about their record is full of crap,” Babcock continues. “I get really moody when we’re getting ready to go in the studio because we’re all putting so much weight on it and so much pressure on our shoulders. When you’re a band going into a studio, you’ve got this small window where you’re spending all of your money and it’s got to go right. And if it doesn’t go right, you get to go work at Starbucks after that. And if it does go right, you get to keep doing the thing that you love the most with your best friends.”

You’re forgiven for assuming that this is just another talking point to sell a new record and add to the lore, but, as Babcock elaborates, this is just how the band operates. “We all have the same vision for this band. We all want to make the best records that we can. I’d so much rather be in a band with these four guys who get fucking passive-aggressive and angry when we are writing because they care so much about doing what they thought was right for the song. It’s a lot to put on yourself, if you really care about it. And we all really care about it, and that’s why we fight.”

To limit the amount of infighting from overthinking, Congleton helped the band follow their first instincts, warts and all. There are parts on the record where Babcock is singing out of key or the band fumbles through an arrangement, both of which, he says, never would’ve been accepted in the past. But Congleton told the foursome to trust their feelings: If a first take felt good, they would move on without any mulligans. “What we wanted to capture was the vibe and the energy of the live show,” Babcock argues. “I think these songs are special, and it’s easy for songs to become not special when they get overcooked. You lose that spark. That’s happened to us so many times in the past, because we’re very neurotic, overthinking people.”

They also brought in their good friend Jeff Rosenstock for album highlight “Get Dumber,” which Babcock says helped the band loosen up in the studio. “Jeff has this personality that brings out the best sides of people. I wrote it in his house while I was house sitting for him, in his basement on his guitar, and recorded the demo using all of his mics. Because I was surrounded by his stuff, I kept hearing his voice on it.” PUP recorded Who Will Look After the Dogs? in Rosenstock’s native LA. Not asking him to be on it, Babcock declares, “would have been mental.”

To record the vocals for “Get Dumber,” Congleton positioned the mics so that Babcock and Rosenstock would be yelling the lyrics at each other. At one point in the second verse, Rosenstock forgot what he was supposed to say and ad-libbed “ahhhhhhh lyrics,” another example of keeping a take that felt good without overthinking it. “We were like, ‘Do you want to try and do it again and get the right lyrics? Or do we want to let this moment be its moment?’ And the song feels special because of that,” Babcock remembers.

That ramshackle, uninhibited spirit is what makes Who Will Look After the Dogs? a refreshing return to the scrappy sound of PUP’s first record, where it was just a band in a room together playing the shit out of their instruments and not worrying about overdubs or anything else. “It’s rough around the edges in a way that I love,” Babcock beams. “It just sounds like us.” In a way, the band really did blow it all up after THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. There’s nothing bloated about this record—no intros or piano interludes, and the chaotic, incongruous meters are minimal. It gets right to the point from the start. On “No Hope,” a second of feedback from a hot amp is extinguished by a cymbal crash, and Babcock yells in your face in his typical nihilistic snark: “Staring into the void now / You’re going down with the ship / You’re taking me with you / I don’t even resist, it’s just what it is.”

While Babcock says all PUP records are personal in nature, the songs on Who Will Look After the Dogs? are more emotionally vibrant than they’ve ever been. You can hear heartbroken agony in the vitriol of “Paranoid” or the deceptively sunny “Best Revenge,” in which Babcock sings, “My friends try and help / They keep telling me that / The best revenge is living well / But I’ve been living like shit it’s been fuckin’ up my sleep.” The aftermath of a breakup is littered all over this album like pieces of shrapnel. “I was sick and tired of letting you blame me for all your fucking problems, just ‘cause you couldn’t solve them,” Babcock sneers on “Needed to Hear It.” Other songs, he says, were written from a perspective of “a much younger me,” like the morbidly funny “Olive Garden,” in which he sings, “You took me to church you asked me to pray / But my thoughts were too obscene / Like, ‘Don’t you Christians spend half of your days / On your knees already?’”

“I think I’ve done a good job of not pulling punches and being pretty honest about who I am and how I feel,” he explains, “I think a lot of the time people are afraid of showing their terrible sides, but it’s not really a fear that I have. It’s a fear that I’ve overcome.”

For a band that loves to play around with fucked-up time signatures (mostly because Babcock says he couldn’t keep time when he played), the songs on Who Will Look After the Dogs? are refreshingly direct. “Cruel,” “Falling Outta Love,” and “Concrete” emphasize that simplicity can go a long way. In fact, PUP is particularly proud of “Concrete” because of how uncomplicated it is. There’s no music theory trickery to make it interesting, and Babcock says it was a struggle not to highlight it as one of the singles. “I love simple songs. My goal when I’m writing songs is to say the most effective thing and something that’s really catchy in the simplest way. It’s something that I would like to tap into a bit more—and I think everybody would.”

PUP is in an interesting place right now. Few punk bands get an opportunity to grow up. One minute you’re in your twenties, getting fucked up and doing 180s on the Don Valley Parkway. The next minute, you’re getting married and having kids, like three-quarters of PUP have done recently. If you’re Babcock, maybe you’re still figuring your shit out by writing songs that no longer seem so stupid or juvenile as they once were. “I feel like people have grown with us,” he reflects. “I was writing songs about getting blasted when I was 22. And now I’m not writing those songs. And I think that the people who started off there, a lot of them are still with us today because we’re writing songs that are still connecting with them.”

It’s not lost on Babcock that, despite suffering from imposter syndrome, he and his bandmates get to do what they love full-time. It’s safe to say the whole PUP thing is no longer a “pathetic use of potential,” as his grandmother once put it years ago. “As much as we complain and fight with each other—and, like I said, being in a band can be tough—we don’t take it for granted,” he says. “We know every day that this is better than the alternative.”

As the band continues to evolve, so does its fanbase, and the shows continue to sell as well, which still surprises Babcock. “It sounds like I’m bullshitting,” he adds, “but we put a show on sale and, every time, I’m like, ‘This is the show that nobody buys tickets to.’ And somehow it sells out.” A few weeks ago, PUP announced a Toronto residency in July they’re calling the “Mega City Madness”—a week where the band will play a series of six shows in their hometown (“I looked at the tour dates yesterday and almost threw up.”). They will play a slew of venues: an undisclosed house show, like the ones where they cut their teeth in the beginning; the 2,500-cap HISTORY. While some of the larger venues they’ve never played before, like the Concert Hall (previously called the Masonic Temple), might provide more fodder for Babcock to blow chunks, it’s on stage—not the studio—where the band is at its freest.

“We have played to zero people. We’ve played to 30,000 people. We’ve played to small and large crowds that hated us and large crowds that loved us. We’ve done every situation,” Babcock gestures. “I think we’re all comfortable. We’re at ease on stage. We’ve experienced it all, and we just know how to handle almost any situation. It’s fucking fun for us. We really enjoy it. It’s one of the times that the interpersonal dynamic tensions are kind of eased between the four of us and we all just like to have fun together. It’s just a really great release for us to have.” And thank God for that. As long as they don’t kill each other, PUP is in this for the long run.

Who Will Look After the Dogs? is out now via Rise Records.

Jeff Yerger is a freelance music writer, musician, and hockey-loving sicko based in Charlotte by way of Philadelphia by way of NJ whose work has also appeared in Stereogum, SPIN, the Recording Academy, Treble, and others. He enjoys both the Collins and Gabriel eras of Genesis equally, and would very much like the New York Rangers to win a Stanley Cup sometime soon. Also, Go Birds.

PUP Embrace Their Imperfections

Vocalist Stefan Babcock talks to Paste about how writing songs in isolation saved him from self-destruction, why he and his bandmates can’t get along in the studio, and the Torontonians’ new album, Who Will Look After the Dogs?