I’m always excited to discover a new ska band, and even more excited when that band is the first band I’ve heard from a given location, and that makes my introduction to the 6-piece band from Lausanne, Switzerland, Huge Puppies a little more special. However, I am very late to the show as Huge Puppies have been around for 20 years and are still putting out great new music.
In early December of 2024 they released a 4 track EP called “Down”. On January 31st, just over a month later, they released a 4 track follow up EP, titled “Out” for the combined name of Down and Out. The songs on “Out” are pretty solidly ska-punk, claiming influences from the Mad Caddies, NOFX, and Rancid. The songs may sound a little more modern than some of their influences, but you can clearly tell that 90s and early 2000s ska bands left their mark on the songwriting styles.
The album feels like the main theme is getting older, and that rings especially true with the first song- “Fight”. The song intros with big horns that set the mood, but the track easily slides from ska punk rhythms, to rock and punk, with vocals that switch styles as easily as the music. This is easily the catchiest of the tracks on the album, and makes you want to sing along where you can with the chorus about fighting for a big break in the music industry. Getting older and being somewhat unknown, but still writing songs and doing what you love, fighting for the chance to break out. While the vocals are impressive throughout this track, it’s the drums that I feel are doing the heaviest lifting here, constantly driving the shifts and changes in the song while keeping everything moving and feeling fresh and interesting, adding let’s of tension and rising action at parts and allowing the guitars to make the song feel epic at parts, but also relaxes into ska rhythms and clears space for the vocals.
The second track is “Runaway”, which features a few more traditional ska upstrokes and is a little more laid back, but still pretty well-situated in the realm of ska punk. As before, the themes show hints of growing older, trying to fulfill dreams of success as a musician, now flavored with dystopian fears of inadequacy and insecurity, imposter syndrome, and the desire to escape from reality to focus on your dreams. Honestly, I feel a lot of us have these same feelings even as most of us aren’t just talking about our dream of making it as a musician. I think it’s this relatability that makes this song so good.
The third track, “Broken Heart”, starts off as the slowest of the tracks, and deals with mostly mental health and depression issues, and has a handful of Sublime song references in the lyrics as the tempo picks up to a faster punk song, and features a shout out dedication to “Bradley”.
The final track is “Down and Out”, a nice tie to the combination of the two EPs combined. This song features the best and most epic horn lines of the two albums. The same themes from the previous three tracks seem to flow through this track, the vocals are the best in this song, and it has a sound that feels more grandiose that the other songs, and ends with a bang, closing on the lyrics “I’m out of time”, which is as fitting of a close for an album as I’ve ever heard.
Written by Gimp Leg
