Fat Dog at Aviva Studios

“It’s fucking Fat Dog, baby.” A year on from their debut album WOOF., that opening declaration still says it all.

The south London five-piece have spent the past few years perfecting a frenzied live show that sends crowds bouncing front to back – even as those rooms keep getting bigger. In no time, they’ve gone from the basement at YES to Band on the Wall, Band on the wall to Manchester Academy. Now they take on the full expanse of Aviva Studios’ Warehouse for a Now Wave Halloween special on the Day of the Dead.

When Fat Dog first formed in 2021, singer Joe Love (real name Joe Love) and his rabble set two rules: they were going to be a healthy band who looked after themselves, and there would be no saxophone in their music. Two simple edicts to live by, both long since broken. “Yeah, it’s all gone out the window,” says Love. Life’s too short to stick to the plans you made in the strange, strait-jacketed days of lockdown. Most of them died around the second banana loaf as I remember.

Fat Dog began as a way for Love to exorcise the home-recorded demos that kept him sane. In Chris Hughes (keyboards/synths), Ben Harris (bass), Johnny Hutchinson (drums) and Morgan Wallace (keyboards and, umm, saxophone), he found a pack of like-minded mavericks. “A lot of music at the moment is very cerebral and people won’t dance to it,” says Hughes. “Ours is the opposite of thinking music.” What they make, Love says, is screaming-into-a-pillow music – a knowingly absurd blend of electro-punk, rock’n’roll snarl, industrial pop and rave euphoria.

Produced by Love with James Ford and Jimmy Robertson, WOOF. is a 38-minute detonation built for losing yourself to. Its calling card ,‘King of the Slugs’, lurches from synthy post-punk into strobe-light release, before collapsing into the kind of klezmer-tinged cacophony that early BCNR favoured. All the Same tightens the screws: a three-minute blast of electro-industrial tension and sing-shouted mania. But the dog grows to its most epic proportions on the album’s deeper cuts – ‘Vigilante’ and ‘I Am the King’ swell with majestic, cinematic grandeur, which only makes the ridiculousness of it all more glorious.

There’s been a couple of drops since that album. The latest single, ‘Pray to That’, is Fat Dog in fast-forward, propelled by a four-to-the-floor beat and Love’s deadpan wit: “Seven shits left to give / Yeah I’ll pray to that.” Co-produced with Dan Carey, it arrives with a suitably unhinged Dylan Coates video in which Love plays a wayward preacher – a role he also seems to assume on stage, converting an ever-growing congregation to the ways of the dog.

At Aviva Studios, expect that same feral energy on a cavernous scale, with a top support lineup to seal the deal: Working Men’s Club bring their serrated, synth-driven post-punk; Manchester/Salford duo SILVERWINGKILLER deal in aggressive bass, live breakbeats and multilingual vocals; and Just For Fun open with sunnier electro-pop to get the party moving.

Don your best Halloween costume. Say your prayers. It’s Fat Dog, baby.