Despite that, this change wasn’t mapped out in advance. “It’s just the songs that you write and the songs that you think are the best fit,” Love says. “That’s not intentional. It’s kind of finding the balance of what you write and what you want to write.” After all, trying to recreate Woof. would risk losing the thing that made it exciting in the first place. Instead, Fat Dog are following whatever gives them that feeling of discovering something new. “You have to stay true to what you actually want to do rather than going for what you think maybe the audience is expecting,” adds Hughes before Love finishes: “Yeah we want to go, oh shit, that sounds good.”

The process itself is suitably messy. Hughes describes it as “creatively flailing for new stuff,” with ideas accumulating until they can be pulled apart and put back together. Love is particularly fond of writing loads of songs and taking pieces from each one. Hughes has a name for it: Modular songwriting. The single “Call It What You Want”, for example, began life closer to a trance song before the band rewrote it. Meanwhile “Aliens” grew from “just an idea that [Love] had, and then flowed into another idea, and then another.” It makes sense for a band that is so non-stop to keep moving forwards until something holds their attention long enough to explore it. 

Lyrically, listeners can expect a more vulnerable record. “From start to finish, I wanted the song to be about a certain thing,” Love muses. “I wanted to write about , which I haven’t really done before.” The result, he feels, is a more personal record. Hughes agrees, pointing to a stronger lyrical component than on the previous album and saying there are moments he can pinpoint to things that have happened over the past two years.