Sydney trio Sweetie are taking ‘Dogtooth’ on the road, announcing an east coast Australian tour in support of their debut album, due September 25 via Blossom Rot Records.
The tour announcement arrives alongside ‘Pay Rise’, the third and final single before the album lands. It finds Lily Keenan, Rikki Clark and Lucy Warriner turning the repetitive grind of working life, consumerism and corporate ambition into wiry, restless post-punk.
For drummer Clark, the song grew from the numbing familiarity of the daily commute and the uncomfortable contradictions that come with it: wanting the pay rise, the good wine and the clothes while simultaneously recognising the culture of consumption and disposability underpinning it all. It is less a song about escaping the machine than realising how difficult it is to find the exit.
Sweetie take that idea somewhere considerably stranger in the self-directed video. The trio loom over a miniature pastel corporate world, playing with the imagery of the millennial girlboss before allowing their characters to literally outgrow the cardboard kingdom they have created. Power might get you to the top, but apparently there is still not much oxygen up there.
DOGTOOTH ALBUM TOUR
Friday, 30 October – Junk Bar, Brisbane/Meanjin
Sunday 8 November – The Servo, Port Kembla/Dharawal
Saturday 14 November – Thornbury Bowlo, Melbourne/Naarm
Saturday 28 November – Heaps Normal Health Club, Sydney/Gadigal
Tickets HERE.
‘Pay Rise’ follows recent singles ‘Godzilla’ and ‘Dogtooth’, all three pointing towards a debut album with considerably more on its mind than simply making noise. Recorded with producer Anna Laverty, whose credits include Courtney Barnett, Folk Bitch Trio and Peep Tempel, and mixed by Wade Keighran, ‘Dogtooth’ takes post-punk, gothic country and abrasive rock into distinctly Australian territory.
Across its 11 tracks, Sweetie draw on gothic Australian narratives, mythology and the increasingly rotten edges of late capitalism, particularly the experience of moving through the world in a female body that becomes politicised whether you ask for it or not. PJ Harvey and Goat Girl sit among their musical reference points, while gothic fiction and spaghetti westerns feed into the album’s broader atmosphere.
It is quite a distance from the circumstances in which Sweetie began. Keenan, Clark and Warriner formed the band during the 2020 lockdowns largely because they wanted to learn how to play music, figuring that starting a band might be the fastest way of doing it. Six years later, those rough beginnings haven’t been polished away so much as turned into part of Sweetie’s character.
Their 2021 debut single ‘Boundary Queen’ was followed by the ‘Collision’ and ‘Punch the Shark’ EPs, produced by Cloud Control’s Alister Wright and Party Dozen’s Jonathan Boulet respectively. Since then, Sweetie have shared stages with Body Type, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Murlocs, Polish Club, The Black Lips and Floodlights, while building towards headline shows of their own.
Now comes the first full-length statement. ‘Dogtooth’ isn’t interested in borrowing rock’s old swagger wholesale. Sweetie are carving out something thornier and more contemporary, where femininity, anger, humour and the absurdities of modern life can all occupy the same song.
