Start Listening To: Dog Race

We speak with Dog Race after their electrifying Truck Festival performance.

Sunday at Truck Festival. It’s 12:45. The sun has reached its peak. Dog Race have entered the Market stage on the last day of the festival, with hangovers and exhaustion amongst plenty of the festival going crowd. Despite of these facts, the band walk out to one of the best received early time slots of the entire weekend, delivering a performance so captivating that those who started out the set sitting down on the grass were up on their feet applauding their efforts by the end. You’d be shocked walking away thinking it was their first ever festival performance with a presence and familiarity that would have you thinking otherwise, speaking to the promise and natural gift the band have so early on in their career.

I had the opportunity to speak the band’s lead singer, Katie Healy, after their highly regarded set.

How are you guys feeling after that performance?

Oh my God, it was amazing. We've literally all been saying that we feel like we're on comedown now. We were saying, oh, we'll get a hundred people. We had our family and friends that came with as well. I saw them at the front and did not expect more people coming through.

I’d love to know a bit of the band lore and how you guys came to be and how you’ve gotten to this point.

So, we've been going for quite a while. We've been going since 2018. We started out and we weren't getting any traction really, because we hadn't really released any music. Then in 2022, after the pandemic, we recorded our first single. We were saving it because we’d gone on a hiatus, members had left. I was like, fuck, are we ever going to release this? And we decided, fuck it, let's do it. We're going to do it, and it got a really good response. A lot better than I thought it would. Since then, we started working with Ali Chant, and it's been really lovely to work with him. He signed us to his label, and ever since then, that's when we started noticing exciting stuff happening.

What can you say about the music scene in Bedford? 

I wouldn't really say there's a scene, there's people doing music. But Bedford is quite amazing. We've had really good artists. Alfie Templeman coming out of Bedford, and we had Tom Grennan too, so it produces good musicians. But it wasn't something that growing up, you'd go down to town to see. I wouldn't go down to the music venue and hang there because it was not a thing.

Can you talk to us a bit about your latest single ‘The Leader’?

I wrote it at the beginning of the year when I was on a coach for eight hours. It’s slightly influenced by personal stuff, but a much exaggerated version of that.

It’s about capitalism and the man. Human’s need for constantly wanting more money for stuff and you always have to pay for more stuff. It was really interesting process because I wrote the song and I kind of thought, there's something there, I think. I'd send it to the lads, and they put it all together. With songs like that, I feel like I can hear that it's going to be a good song.

What influences are you drawing from to create your lyrics?

Do you know what? Scripts, like film scripts. I'm really into directors and I work in music as well in music supervision. 

I do find myself referencing a lot of scripts. Which I don't think I really picked up on until recently. There's a lot of authors and books that I read but actually the inspiration doesn't really come from there, it comes from my personal life and then I might be watching a film, I'd be like fucking hell, that's a really good line. I was writing ‘The Leader’ and I was searching for the chorus for ages and then I was watching this film. And the character said, ‘to find salvation’. And I already had, ‘there is a premier’. That's it! The line then comes together. It's just really helpful. Any kind of media platform in a sense can be an inspiration.

I think what you guys do well is combine genres to end up with your own distinctive sound. How have you come into your own sound and veered away from obvious draw ins like post punk?

When we started gigging, we were probably quite influenced by the post punk scene, just because you’re going gigs and you're going to pick up on that. I knew that I didn't want to be declared as post punk because I think the best thing about really good post punk is how poetic it is and how political it is, and I felt I couldn't get in the head of writing lyrics like that, and when I did, it would just sound awful.

What I was writing was a lot darker. I got quite heavy into Krautrock. So, there’s inspiration from the German music scene in the 70s and 80s, and Klaus Nomi. Until then, I was really confused. What are we going to be? Because I'm writing something that sounds like this, but I can't hear that in the London music scene as much. And then I referenced back to the music from that era in Germany, and it just really connected with me. Everything makes such sense.  Definitely Kraftwerk and recently Can. And I really love. X-Mal Deutschland as well, which are a darker female band, with gothic vocalists. It’s a combination of all of it. 

What does the rest of the year look like for the band?

We’ve got a couple of European festivals, which is amazing. We're doing Haldernpop in Germany next month, which I'm really looking forward to, and a festival in France at the end of the year. I'm just really looking forward to seeing when that's out there.

You can catch the band at their headliner show at Corsica Studios on the 25th of September.