“I really love that song,” Babcock says. “I think all of the things I would say I like about PUP—like the heavy parts and the scrappiness, but also the catchiness and the unhinged lyrics and stuff—usually they don’t all coalesce into one song, but I feel like we did it in this one. And I also think there’s a lot of humour.” 

That humour specifically refers to the song’s bassline, which borrows from the 1961 doo-wop adaptation of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens. When Chumak started playing it, Babcock cracked up. “Because the song is really angry, you know? But it’s a very PUP thing for us to write dark songs and then try and take the piss out of them. The songs definitely come from a real place, but then it’s just, like, you have to kind of laugh at it, the situation.”  

Later that night at Rogers Arena, PUP hit the stage between Gob and Sum 41, bookended by their childhood heroes on a triple bill that radiated strong early-2000s Warped Tour energy—minus the sunburn. The band was tight and dialed-in, their anthemic choruses lighting up the arena, with Babcock proving once again to be a magnetic frontman. The crowd was massive, a sea of t-shirts repping different eras of all three bands. The atmosphere was nothing short of electric.

* * * 

A few weeks later, Babcock is back home in Toronto. The rest of the tour was “really fun,” he says, speaking over Zoom while wearing a Gob t-shirt that he picked up from the band while on tour. Now, Babcock’s sole focus is on Who Will Look After The Dogs?.

The band usually takes about four years to work on an album, but Babcock found himself to be more prolific than ever, writing more than 30 songs in just under a year. Part of it was because he’d been flexing his creative muscles more in general—writing with others outside of PUP, like for Lizzie Killian’s Teens in Trouble project—which offered him a different perspective on his craft. 

“When we first started this band, it’s not that I didn’t like writing songs, but I was writing songs so that we could have enough songs to play a set so that we could go on tour,” he says. “And now that we’re older and we’ve been doing it for a while, I’ve just really deeply fallen in love with songwriting. In a way that, now, even though it’s my job more than ever, it just feels like release and relief — and fun. I just feel like a kid when I’m writing.” 

One of PUP’s biggest strengths has always been the way they bridge humour with vulnerability, and it’s done especially well on Who Will Look After The Dogs?, from the lyrics themselves to Babcock’s delivery of them—honest, acerbic, and gleefully wry. “The best revenge is living well,” he proclaims on “Best Revenge,” which moves between woozy and clear-eyed pop-rock. “I’ve been living like shit, it’s been fucking up my sleep.”

It comes playfully on songs like “Concrete”—“you seemed pretty disturbed and I was just trying to get down with your sickness,” a fun reference to the 2000 Disturbed hit—as well as in heartbreaking revelations of pain, like on “Hallways,” which features the line the album takes its name from: “I’m losing the will to keep dragging on, but I can’t die yet, ‘cause who will look after the dog?”  

“I’m always trying to thread the needle of being earnest and emotional, but also really fun and, at times, funny,” says Babcock. “There’s this thing about taking your craft seriously, but not taking yourself seriously. I’m very serious about songwriting, but I have trouble taking myself too seriously.” 

There’s this duality, he continues, where you’re struggling with something, “whether a mental health thing or because of a specific circumstance in your life, and you might be talking to a friend and say something that’s so fucked up and you really believe it and it’s really dark. And then, two months later, when all of that has washed past you, you reflect on what you said and it’s so fucking funny, because it’s over dramatic—or maybe not even over dramatic. It’s just, like, damn, that was a weird headspace to be in and I’m so far removed from that person now. That’s something that I’m always trying to capture—but capture the second part of that, the reflection of, ‘Whoa, I was really hurting, and the way I was acting and thinking and reacting is funny now that I have some space from it.’ I think that’s really just important for all of us to understand. Life’s tough and sad and hard — and it’s fucking funny, too.” 

Producer John Congleton, Babcock says, “really got it.” The band would play something a couple times, record it, and move on. It captures the dynamic and raw energy that drives their live show, and allows the songs to speak for themselves. “Olive Garden,” for example, is dynamic and distorted, the tempo moving from jaunty to brutal. “Get Dumber,” featuring Jeff Rosenstock, is all noisy and pummelling and feels like you’ve snuck into the band’s jam space to catch a spontaneous session. With an off-key vocal here, a wrong note and sharp feedback there, it’s deliberately not pristine—it’s real. 

“There’s so much imperfection on this record—so much more than anything else we’ve done—in a way that I just really love,” says Babcock. “I just think this record sounds more like the four of us than anything we’ve done before.”

It recalls the feeling of listening to an album that seems perfect because its imperfections not only contribute so much to its character, but have become so ingrained in the listener—like, for Babcock, There’s Nothing Wrong With Love by Built To Spill, his favourite band. You can hear what they’re trying to do, he says, and that they don’t quite nail it somehow makes it even more powerful. 

“When I first started listening to that record, when I was 14, somebody burned it for me. There was a scratch on the CD that they gave where it just [went], like, ‘sh-sh-sh,’ at a certain part in one of the songs. And I listened to it so many times that I didn’t notice it anymore. And when I finally bought the record for myself when I had enough money and it wasn’t there, I was like, something’s wrong!” Babcock laughs. “If you love it and consume it a lot, you get so used to those characters—things that give records life and make them feel really genuine and unique and special.” 

There have been a few records in Babcock’s life that changed the way he thought about music—“I think any music fan has this,” he notes—whether it was Gob or Built to Spill or progressive ska bands like RX Bandits. Records that took his breath away and subverted any preconceived notions he had about boundaries or structure, proving things don’t have to be perfect to be perfect. Things that left a profound imprint on Babcock—not just as an artist, but as a human being, growing through twofold magic of musical discovery and self-discovery. 

“My dream is to make a record that, for kids who are getting into music, it opens a new way of thinking about music for them, like in the way that the first time I heard Built to Spill was,” says Babcock. “I was like, ‘Music is allowed to sound like this?’” 

“I don’t claim to think that PUP does that for anybody,” he adds with a laugh. “But it’s my dream to make a record that opens people’s minds to a new way of looking at this genre.”