Dan Hillier
The group’s second record, Pure Evil see’s the London riff barons further pushing the themes established on their initial EPs and their 2019 LP The Goat without compromising the formula that makes them such a unique act. Across 13 chainmail-clad tracks, Puppy take spiked gauntlet adorned metal aesthetics and repurpose them for contemporary pop structures in a way that’s complementary to the foundations of the metal sound. The resulting product is something that’s akin to a broadsword to metal stoicism, a funeral pyre for cliched alt-rock sound that now quantities as success and something that’s fun, charming and ultimately brilliant.
With the record out now via Rude Records, we got in touch with Puppy to break down Pure Evil, Track by Track.
“We’d never really done a proper “intro” for an album or EP before so wanted something massively imposing and grand like the 20th Century Fox Theme or the music from a Christopher Nolan trailer. It makes use of a drone which is like a fun musical device we’ve never got to use before too.”
“This was a track originally written for our debut album The Goat that we picked up again when this album started to take shape. When it became clear that Pure Evil was gonna be a bit more diverse from song to song we felt like this had more of a place. We re wrote the lyrics to sit more with how we felt about the potential pressures of making a second album; talking about “destroying your ego” and a “faceless fear” following you around.”
“This was a fun song that just came together super quickly. We wanted it to hit fast and hit hard so we kept shaving it down to make it rush past and feel like you wanted to listen to it again rather than labouring the point. It’s also got two guitar solos in it which equates to roughly a guitar solo per minute, which I feel is the golden ratio.”
“This is probably the song that sounds the most like The Goat on the album. It has a super intricate riff and stomps around more than the others I think. Then it’s got like a real thrash bridge that comes in later on. It really goes round the houses. Classic Puppy if you will”
“This was kind of a half finished idea that we probably wouldn’t have recorded if we hadn’t been doing it ourselves to be honest. I was pushing to flesh it out into a full thing and Billy wanted to try doing a stripped back version that would act as sort of an interlude, so we did and it really worked. Decisions like that really helped set the tone of the album, like to give it this mixtape feel. We were always quite scared of being too scattergun with our songs and it was really liberating to lean into that.”
“This is an interesting track because what started life as probably a fairly straightforward song of ours kind of got shaped by the overall tone of the album. Musically it reaches a halfway point that’s pretty structurally traditional, and then it segues into this floaty guitar and vocal section before this big thrash outro. It kind of flits between sounds in quite a linear way which is cool. Again, I think experimenting with the recording helped us try stuff like that out a bit more. If we’d been on the clock we probably would have pulled it back to finish on the chorus, but I love the way this turned out.”
‘Spellbound’ into ‘Dear John’ is a really lovely transition I think. It was written as a tribute to a dear friend of ours who passed away during the making of this album. Putting that kind of emotion into words was hard, so it ended up being a classical guitar inspired thing. He had a tattoo that said “Hi There!”, which is from the film Doctor Strangelove; it’s graffitied on one of the atomic bombs. After he died I realised there was a second bomb sat beside the first that said ‘Dear John’, so we named it as a little companion piece to him and his memory.”
“This was a really fun track to write. We were inspired by heavy bands slowing down and simplifying their music to sound heavier like AC/DC on Back In Black or Metallica on their self titled album. The whole thing is built around down tuning our guitars super low and just pounding out this really repetitive drone that sounds like it’s in slow motion or something. When we first got the mix back it just hit like a ton of bricks and we were so excited for people to hear it.”
“This was one of the first tracks we completed for the album. It has a real nice, compact feel and structure and we just wanted it to be this super catchy, heavy pop song. We made the lyrics a little darker to try and juxtapose the bounciness of the music, pulling from religious imagery and Lovecraft-ian Eldritch Horror type stuff to give them a cartoonish feel. Singing about being ancient ones in this really major key was fun.”
“This took a lot of cues from bands like Fuzz or Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats in terms of using really simple, doom-ey chord progressions with these 60’s/ 70’s type harmonies. Lyrically it’s the least personal on the album, but it was heavily inspired by the world of the Dark Souls games. It’s probably my geekiest moment as a lyricist, but as it developed it was really fun to lean into this really melodramatic feel that classic rock/ metal has but crib heavily from that game. The idea of sacrifice and “distant horse hooves” hearing “the bell sound” and all that.”
“Along with ‘Holy Water’ this was one of the earliest songs that came together and the reason it was the first single. It has a similar vibe of being really compact, heavy pop music. Lyrically it’s playing on the transition between only caring about yourself and then caring about someone else equally or even more, and cursing that person for turning your life upside down. It’s like a petulant, selfish voice that’s annoyed that everything else you used to enjoy in life pales in comparison to this person now.”
“This is up there with one of my favourite songs we’ve ever done. It felt like we’d discovered a brand new sound. We took a lot of cues from our favourite hip hop songs which is not something we’re often able to do; for example the rhythm guitar at the beginning is meant to mimic the piano intro from ‘Still D.R.E’. We knew it would be hard to get it to hit in the way we wanted it to, but Cody Brown who mixed the album did a great job at bringing out what the song needed. We wanted it to sound like driving along in the rain at night with neon lights twinkling around you and this super introspective sadness going round in your head. The feeling of thinking back on an embarrassing incident or acting/ not acting how you should’ve and how crushing that can be.”
“This was the last track that came together for the album. We had everything finished and felt we were missing one more banger, so with literally a week to go before we had to hand the album in we went back into the studio and turned this around from writing it to it being a finished song in a couple of days. Having had all the time in the world to work on the album it was different to have a big deadline suddenly appear, but good as it lit a bit of a fire under us and gave us this laser focus for getting it done. It’s potentially my favourite song on the album too, which is a plus. It kinda reflects how we were feeling when we stopped touring The Goat at the end of 2019; burned out, tired, but then punctuated by these moments when we were playing where we’d feel high and hugely elevated. That sort of translated into a more universal thing of finding moments of joy in times when things are a bit tough.”