Track By Track: Office Dog's New Album 'Prime Corner'

Garnering praise from all with ears to hear, Office Dog's new album Prime Corner launched just over a week ago via Flying Nun Records. Adeptly defying easy avant-rock / post-punk categorisations, the Aotearoa trio of Kane Strang, Rassani Tolovaa and Mitchell Innes have a local release tour lined up for September, rolling into Double Whammy in Tāmaki Makaurau, Ōtepoti's The Crown, Lyttelton Coffee Company, plus Eyegum's GREAT SOUNDS GREAT festival in the capital. Produced, engineered and mixed by De Stevens at Roundhead Studios, Strang took us on a guided tour of Office Dog's sophomore long player. Listen along with his insights below, and grip a physical copy from your friendly local record store / merch table...

Office Dog Album Release Tour

Friday 4th September - Double Whammy, Auckland
Saturday 5th September - GREAT SOUNDS GREAT festival, Wellington*
Friday 11th September - The Crown Hotel, Dunedin
Saturday 12th September - Lyttelton Coffee Company, Christchurch

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR
*GREAT SOUNDS GREAT tickets via eyegum.co.nz

Front Row Seat

This came a little later on during the writing of Prime Corner and at that point I was sitting on a lot of the softer, more singer-songwriter-y tracks. I just felt like making something fast and fun to play again, kind of like our song Big Air, and getting out some of the thoughts I was having about feeling stagnant or unable to make decisions. That’s definitely what I’m talking about with the whole “showroom” thing in the chorus.

Filming the video for this is one of the highlights of the past year for me. Sophie Black and Pepe De Hoyos put together this incredible team of stunt people and actors and spending a day watching them scrap was very fun.

Futures

This could be my favourite but it was by far the hardest to write. The chords I’m playing are so discordant a lot of the time and getting them, the bass line and my vocal melody to all fit together was a mission. Mitch probably sat there for hours while Rass and I went back and forth trying every note on the fret board for some of the little runs he does in the verses. We got there in the end though.

It might be obvious but lyrically this is a play on the idea of the past catching up on you. Here it’s these different imagined futures that are the problem and making the present harder to enjoy. Then in the outro I’m speaking about how much is out of our control at the end of the day, and saying that sometimes it’s just best to try let some of that go.

Reins

There was a time where I thought this one wasn’t going to work at all and I almost didn’t show it to Mitch and Rass. Maybe because it felt like an outlier for us with its big chorus. Over time though it definitely grew on us, enough to be a single, and it’s actually been one of my favourites to play on our recent tour. I especially like Mitch’s drum fill at the very end.

Shout out to East who perfectly captured the feeling of this song with his beautiful video, too. I’ve been wanting to work with him for a long time.

Permanent Day

This started out as a voice memo in my phone called “ice skating” from when I was doing a house sit in West Auckland. I didn’t have any words to it then but that’s definitely where the part about being out on the ice will be from.

I think it’s just about those days that stick with you for one reason or another, not fading out like the rest. I remember blasting the demo out of my dad's monitors, just singing over it for hours at my parent’s place until some kind of cohesive thing formed. I’d bike over there and work on lyrics a lot because there was a guy living underneath me in town that would flip out if I shut a door slightly too loud, let alone played music.

Slowing to a Walk

Joel from Pearly* works for my uncle at his piano shop in Dunedin and when Dale Kerrigan went to China last year I sat in for him for a few weeks. Either him or my cousin Neive had left a guitar there which I was playing a lot and one day I wrote this riff out back. At this point all of the other tracks had been demoed and I was about to head back up north to record, but starting to feel like the album was missing something; another slightly heavier thing.

My favourite part of recording this was getting my dad to play the cowbell when he came in for a studio visit. Cowbell can be the most ridiculous sounding thing in the world but he had a great time bashing away and now I can’t imagine the song without it.

Lesson

The setting to this one is definitely central Dunedin on a Friday or Saturday night. It can just get so chaotic and violent in there sometimes and wading through it after a gig or something is pretty sketchy if you’re not dressed like a Hallensteins mannequin.

I know this is De’s favourite. And I really like the subtle piano line he put in the second verse.

Homemade Canyon

This is one of those “alone, together” kind of songs lyrically. And about worrying that you’re bringing someone down because you're in a bit of a state.

The recorded version is pretty much exactly what we demoed in our old Storage King practice space. I always thought we’d rearrange the more riffy part of the outro especially, but sometimes you just get attached and anything else sounds strange. It also gets so tempting to start layering heaps of extra instrumentation with something like this, but we were really trying to let the song speak for itself. We are a three piece (most of the time) and it's a rule of ours to only do that when we all think it’s really necessary.

Dirt

De wanted to record this one Elliot Smith style, so that’s what we did. I played and sang at the same time, which I usually only do for a guide vocal, and then played / sang to my first take a couple more times to get that sort of rich, layered effect. It was the last thing we recorded, meaning I was completely fried, and as I was performing the doubles I didn’t really know which voice in my headphones was me in the moment. It was very surreal.

De also joined me on keys for the first take, which was special as we’ve never just played together like that while recording before. It took us a little while to get through the whole thing without one of us cooking the instrumental melody (he learned it on the spot like the wizard he is), but we got determined to not comp takes and have the whole thing as organic as possible. I’m glad we stuck it out because I’m really proud of it now.

Gold Things

This was the first song I wrote for the album down in Central Otago. I’d never mucked around with open tunings before but became more curious after listening to this Thurston Moore album called Demolished Thoughts that De had sent me. Something about it really hit home at the time and I was getting pretty bored of the stuff I’d written post our Doggerland EP. It was all just sounding the same and I knew it was probably time to experiment properly again; get a bit uncomfortable.

Despite being one of the heavier ones it’s really a positive song about getting something you’ve wanted for a while, which is why I wanted it here on the tracklist too. I guess the idea was that you’ve been down in the dirt and now you’re finally hitting some gold.

Everywhere Song

I was working on a soundtrack for a short film of Sophie's while writing this album. She’s directed a lot of our music videos, including Front Row Seat like I said, and it was nice to get a chance to return the favour. It also meant I was writing a lot of instrumental stuff at the time and I realised it could be interesting to have something like this on the record; for us three to try and express something with only music for once.

I called it Everywhere Song as a reference to the line at the end of Prime Corner — the “overlooking everywhere” bit.

Prime Corner

I saw this phrase on a big yellow and red real estate sign while on our way to the airport in the US and for me it represents a place of clarity and acceptance. There’s also a lot of references to the home throughout the record so I thought it made sense as the actual album name.

This is one of the ones we actually did split into two parts when recording, mainly because we were really wanting to get the best take possible for the end. I knew it’d be last and when the whole record came together in a way. Definitely my favourite part here is in the transition from the first half to the second, with Rass’ really beautiful little bass part that De mimicked on the piano.