Cancel Me (I'm Tired): Fat Dog run on fumes and one great chorus

Fat Dog have made a record about exhaustion and then shouted the whole way through it. Cancel Me (I'm Tired) is the South London six-piece's second album, out on Domino, and it wants to be a burnout document and a party at the same time. It is much better at one of those than the other.

WOOF, the 2024 debut, took the band's live reputation and squeezed it onto tape: distorted electro-punk, blunt and loud, one-note by the back half. Two years on, several original members have left. The question for a band like this is whether there is a second idea underneath the first one.

The band recorded the album under stress and burnout, and frontman Joe Love worked through most of it on roughly three hours of sleep a night. Ten tracks, released 2 October 2026, and the tiredness is audible in the voice and the arrangements.

The sound is still distorted electro-punk with an industrial disco pulse under it, plus a synth-pop streak the debut kept hidden. What has changed is the temperature. Where WOOF sprinted, this one staggers, and Love writes from somewhere between a threat and a shrug.

Smile And Wave opens with the biggest industrial disco cut here, synths and drums piled up until a horse neighs over the top of them, which is a lot of trust to place in one joke. Go Fuck Urself is the best thing on the album by a distance: a smooth synth-pop chorus with Love almost crooning, a pop hit built out of spite, and the one moment where the band's volume and its melodies agree.

The title track sets weary defiance over a disco beat that glitters, Love too tired to finish his own thought: "was gonna write the next line, I can't be bothered". Heart Of Darkness drops into a listless crawl and is better for the restraint. Snakes is the theatrical, folky ballad, Love sounding like he has not slept in days, and it is the record's one properly uncomfortable listen.

Then the middle sags. Shit Love and Bad Dog both run on the same manic propulsion, and both are better in short doses; back to back they stop being songs and become one long agitated riff. The album is ten tracks and does not need to be. The shouting that arrives as a threat starts to read as a tic.

Love's lyrics are where the album is most exposed. He writes about wanting out, about being too tired to keep going, and he sounds like he means it; the record never works out what to do with admissions like that. They land, and the next minute moves on.

Fat Dog sit where Klaxons' neon, Sigue Sigue Sputnik's cheap chrome and Nine Inch Nails' low end meet, and anyone who wanted that collision with a dance pulse will get a night out of it. If you played WOOF on repeat, three tracks here are worth keeping. If you were waiting for a second gear, it has not arrived.

Cancel Me (I'm Tired) is a great title wrapped around one great pop song and a lot of noise that does not hold up. Two and a half: the burnout is real, the ideas are not, and the band shouts its way past both.

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