Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out review – stomps straight to the top of British punk’s table

For the most part, Lambrini Girls’ debut album barrels along in roughly the style that’s hoisted the Brighton duo to cult success over the last few years. There are huge, distorted basslines courtesy of Lily Macieira and equally distorted guitar playing from Phoebe Lunny that flits between post-punk angularity and occasional bursts of poppier, Ramones-y chords. The rhythms are frantically paced, and there are lyrics that focus on societal ills, delivered in Lunny’s distinctive vocal style: she sings like someone angrily trying to make their point in a particularly noisy bar, as a bouncer struggles to usher them out of the door.

Combined, this music has drawn appreciative nods from a range of forebears including Iggy Pop, Kathleen Hanna and Sleater Kinney’s Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein. Iggy is so enamoured of the duo that he got them to collaborate on a version of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus that appeared alongside tracks by Andrea Corr and Rick Astley on a Trevor Horn-helmed covers album: improbable company in which to find a band whose first EP arrived in a sleeve featuring a pile of shit on fire.

But Who Let the Dogs Out’s closing track takes a different tack. There are synths, a four-to-the-floor disco beat and a hooky, chant-a-long chorus. In place of the aforementioned litany of societal ills, the lyrics offer a list of positive actions and scrappy pleasures: if you wanted, you could view it as a kind of Brat-era successor to Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ beloved Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part Three). In theory, it could be a cunning bit of career-building entryism, a shift from confrontation and aggression that could move Lambrini Girls away from 6Music’s recesses and playlists called things like New Noise, and towards a broader audience. In practice, not so much. The track is called Cuntology 101, it uses the word “cunt”, or variations thereof, 32 times in just over two minutes and ranks among its list of life’s small delights getting semen on your clothes, “shagging behind some bins”, “having an autistic breakdown” and – congratulations, we have a winner – “doing a poo at your friend’s house”.

You might thus surmise that Lambrini Girls aren’t at home with the concept of subtlety and you would have a point: in fairness, few punk bands ever did much business due to their refined understatement. But for all its unrelenting full-throttle approach and its way with a jagged riff – and Lambrini Girls are very good at coming up with jagged riffs – there’s a richness to Who Let the Dogs Out’s sound that suggests a range of potential routes forward. The rhythm of Bad Apple veers towards a drum’n’bass breakbeat. No Homo’s examination of flexible sexuality is spiked with sudden bursts of surprisingly sweet harmony vocals. Love twists and turns, dies away and gradually rebuilds itself, mirroring the narrator’s fretting over a failing relationship: “I love you so much it makes me feel sick, so hold back my hair until I stop.”

Most of the time, the lyrics focus on the kind of topics that have fuelled bands like Lambrini Girls for decades: police brutality (Bad Apple), toxic masculinity (Big Dick Energy, Company Culture), and what a generation of spittle-flecked Roxy-goers – now theoretically old enough to be Lambrini Girls’ grandparents – would have called “poseurs” (Filthy Rich Nepo Baby). Meanwhile, You’re Not From Around Here tackles gentrification, a topic so prevalent in recent US punk releases that one waggish writer dubbed it “the new Ronald Reagan”.

Of course, the fact that these topics are well worn doesn’t mean that they’re not still depressingly relevant. Bad Apple has very clearly been written in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder – “hang the pigs that hunt your daughters,” Lunny rasps – while the issue of poseurs is compounded by issues of access in the 21st-century music scene, an era in which it’s substantially easier to get ahead if your parents are bankrolling you. More importantly, they tackle these issues with appealing scabrous humour: “Michael, I don’t want to suck you off on my lunch break,” snaps Lunny on Company Culture. The Kate Moss-referencing Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels, a song that deals with eating disorders, balances its harrowing reportage with unexpected humour: “Also, diet drinks taste like absolute fucking shit.”

It makes you laugh even as it’s confronting you about something horrendous, which is not easy to do. Nor is seeding music that is nasty, brutish and short – that effectively spends half an hour screaming in the listener’s face – with this much depth and variety. It hints at a bright future: Lambrini Girls might be in the process of quickly screaming themselves hoarse, but you wouldn’t bank on it.

Who Let the Dogs Out is released 10 January

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