Dog Eat Dog

Dr. Dog isn't your typical modern take on an indie rock band. Sure, there are more than a few contemporary outfits taking cues from The Band, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and other sounds from the 1960s, but what Dr. Dog do is larger than that. Rather than mimicking these past proceedings, the sextet breathe new life into what they do and completely own it. Having only released an album 18 months ago, the prolific outfit has the next ready – their seventh release and first recorded entirely in their brand new studio, the B-Room.

“We love to record,” Toby Leaman exudes, “so there's no sense in not laying down this material. Plus we seem to burn out pretty quickly on the road of the old material – we like to be playing new stuff as often as we can. The way the cycles work for us are kind of short because whenever we weren't on the road, we were recording anyway. So it just became pretty common for us to put something out every year, year-and-a-half, two years, just because, well, whatever else are we going to do when we're at home?”

B-Room is a self-produced affair – the way the band likes it, and the chosen method for every album bar 2010's Shame Shame. But who exactly makes the calls?

“There kind of isn't anyone in charge,” Leaman laughs. “Our buddy Nathan Sabatino is sort of in charge of the engineering and does all the leg work in getting stuff down to tape or into the computer, but that is a headache sometimes as that really is a democracy. Everybody's got an opinion, everybody's got something to say about stuff. Sometimes that slows things down. Mostly, everyone is in agreement but a line does need to be drawn. It comes down to Scott [McMicken, co-lead vocalist, co-lead songwriter], they're mine and his songs. If shit really hits the fan, then it ultimately comes down to one of us.”

B-Room features some of the most soulful material of Dr. Dog's career to date; they overhauled the writing and recording process completely, even capturing some songs live in rehearsal.

“This record, with the exception of a couple tunes, was pretty easy,” Leaman says. “I mean the tracks just came out and as soon as they were recorded, sometimes in rehearsal, they were pretty much near done. It's not effortless at all, we sound like it is but an awful lot of effort goes into it.”

Having only toured in Australia once, Leaman acknowledges they're well overdue for a jaunt Down Under. “We were actually just talking about that today,” Leaman laughs. “We really want to put some sort of tour down there into works. We won't be able to do it until the end of all the American stuff but yeah, we will definitely be down there.”