Dog Unit

London quartet Dog Unit make music that takes on the scale of a mutant orchestra, a single mind of 16 limbs in perpetual forward motion and unspoken shared purpose. A motorik groove, an insistent hook, a melody’s shifting breeze – these aren’t rock songs, but living, breathing creatures as prone to change and constancy as we are.

The intricacies of their sound, the formidable sense of tension and relief, take on a new gravitas when seen live. The mythology of this band – boiler-suited, arranged in a horseshoe formation and building worlds in a hypnotic, unbroken hour of music – only underlines their miraculous synergy.  Sam Walton and Henry Scowcroft’s guitars take a pendulum-swing from wild, wailing feedback to melodic grace; bassist James Weaver constructs sleek, minimal wonders with supreme focus; and the beats of drummer Lucy Jamieson ground these forces and carve their path forward.

2024 saw the deliverance of Dog Unit’s vision with their debut album, At Home, which reached #36 in the UK Official Record Store Chart and secured a spot in Rough Trade’s top 100 albums of the year. It was written not as individual pieces but as a suite of music that follows an arc of storytelling. There is the soft-bleed of ‘Concrete Barges on the Banks of The Thames’ as the scene is set; the dislocating jeopardy of its mid-point ‘We Can Still Win This’; the third-rail sparking danger of its final act, ‘Consistent Effort’, and the blissful sublimation of ‘The Dogs Are Barking Again’, its epilogue as the curtain falls.

They followed that up with the lush acoustic-reworkings EP At Home, Still, where the band explored new sonic avenues, deconstructing the album’s post-rock compositions and rebuilding them as chamber folk with the aid of a string quartet, upright piano, flugelhorn, harmonium and bass clarinet.

An elevation of their forerunning EPs Barking to Gospel and Turn Right and Right Again, At Home and its accompanying EP are more ambitious – and more lovingly crafted – than ever before. Fluent in a dialect of their own creation with an instinct to run with the pack as far as their legs will take them, Dog Unit are a leaner, sharper beast than ever before.