The Fuzz, the Fury, and All the Shadows In Between: An Interview with Dog Race

Photo by Holly Whitaker I Illustration by Carolina Munce

Comprised of Katie Healy on vocals, Jed Healy on drums, James Kelly on guitar, Dillon Willis on keys, and Will Macnab on bass, Dog Race is a five-piece that, every once in a while, reminds me that a band can shake, disrupt, and reconstruct what we’re willing to settle for. 

There’s a pantheon of journalists today flirting with genre-tags, labels that once helped map a scene or define a sound, but now seem elastic enough to stretch over just about anything.  Push something hard enough and it can be post-punk, push even further and in a few years we’ll come up with something like “bubble-gum-shimmer-cum-pop” and it will be canon, as long as it has a name. Ironically, some of the most profound things in life, the cosmic, the metaphysical, the philosophical or belief itself, are the ones that language fails. Dog Race, stands firmly in that creative realm where the source stays sacred. Even within the contours of an interview, a space that naturally demands explanation, the band avoids using language that would box the project in. Instead, they speak in terms that reach sideways, toward something less literal. In the Dog Race DNA, feeling does the heavy lifting. Whatever that feeling is, it acts like a sixth, invisible member, shaping the sound without ever needing to explain it.

The band recorded their latest EP Return The Day over the course of 18 months, beginning with the single The Squeeze, working alongside producer Ali Chant. That first track served as something of a trial, a low-pressure project without a label attached. About three months after releasing The Squeeze, they returned to the studio to record The Leader, a stand-out single that we’ve all devoured with such adoration, I know I did anyway. Dog Race's’s formation hasn’t been straightforward nor conventional either. In 2019, during the pandemic, they took what ended up being a two-and-a-half-year break, unsure if they’d even regroup. James joined the band after discovering them through their debut single, which he had actually reviewed for So Young, where he works (and whose merch he was proudly wearing during our interview). A year later, Dillon joined, and since then, Dog Race has functioned as a proper five-piece. 

The collaboration process might seem disjointed to some, but for Dog Race, it's exactly what makes everything click. What starts as a skeleton of a song gradually takes on flesh, pieced together across different times and shifting momentums. “Katie comes up with a little idea and sends it to one of us, and we see if we can bring something out of it,” James explains. “It’s a case of reworking until everything falls into place. A lot of the time, we don’t actually play it together until it’s fully written as a demo.”

What Katie calls “average songs” gets tossed off immediately. Being driven by a strong sense of novelty, they simply refuse to put out songs that they are not “at least 80 percent happy with” in her own words. “We could sound like any generic band, there are really good bands in London, very good ones,” she admit. “But we’ve all got full-time jobs, and we’re not chasing some pipe dream. We actually enjoy the work we do outside of music. I just want us to sound different, not for the sake of being different, but because I genuinely feel there’s a creative gap in the scene.” What Dog Race offers to the table, is a vision that is shaped by a true artistic calling that has been nurtured over time without a sense of urgency, once that is organically developed through intuition. It’s that same intuition that eventually guided Katie towards a more expressive, operatic singing style. “When we started the band, we didn’t really know that this was how Katie wanted to sing. There was this whole process of her figuring that out. It actually happened during a rehearsal.” Will explains. “She stopped us at one point and said she had an idea, then just started singing. And we were like, okay, that’s really cool.” 

Katie carries a quiet intensity on stage with the understated charisma of an early Ian Curtis. Clad in red, she looks as though she’s wandered off the set of The Leader music video, resurrected and disoriented, back among her bandmates after a symbolic live burial. Her movements are instinctive: a swaying neck, subtle contortions, eyes cast downward, sometimes dropping to her knees without ceremony. There’s no trace of affectation or a choreographed gimmick. Instead, she emanates a kind of intimate magnetism that is disorienting at first. “I had such bad stage fright when I was younger. Every week felt like hell.” She recalls. “We did the play Aida when I was 12 and they put me in an operatic vocal song and I performed it to my parents and they were like “What the fuck”.” 

That early moment, a kind of accidental discovery, seems to have lingered quietly in the background for years. It feels like it wasn’t just about realizing she could sing, but more about unlocking something larger, something dormant. With Dog Race, that voice, and the larger-than-life sound it carries, finally found its container. However the music videos are also the recipient. The video for The Squeeze plays like a Dario Argento fever dream, while The Leader follows Katie as she calmly buries herself alive, shovel in hand, a surreal, self-authored ritual. When asked to explain the process for those videos Jed explains: “Getting a shovel, burying one’s self there are a hundred different ways you could do that. It was all trial and error, figuring out how far you can lean into an idea before it tips over into ‘too much.” They keep a firm boundary when it comes to tumbling over the edge into a pool of references, their safety net being the Dog Race sound that they have managed to make it their own over the course of the years. “We all grew up on music from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, eras where the production itself carried so much emotion,” they explain.

“Listening to a lot of music now, everything sounds so high-tech, so pristine, that it starts to lose feeling. Even though we record in a great studio, we’re always trying to push things into a rougher space, whether it’s through the pedals we use or certain recording techniques. The songs would sound completely different if we weren’t constantly chasing that texture.”

That gritty, rough-edged sound, combined with Katie’s dramatic vocals, has carved out a space where the go-to adjectives of the day get slapped on left and right. “That’s interesting when people define us as a ‘gothic band,’ there really isn’t a gothic scene in London,” Katie says. “I think when people use ‘gothic,’ they’re mostly referencing gothic literature or anything with that vampire-y vibe. There’s a lot of lazy writing out there. There are some amazing fucking journalists, but also a lot who just throw bands into boxes without much thought. Like, you could not even be a post-punk band but get labeled that way.” 

Dog Race delivers a revelation wrapped in fuzz and fury. Their now-signature sound, destined to inspire countless imitators, drags ghosts from the grave, pulled straight from the depths of their subconscious, and throws them headfirst into the mosh pit, reliving buried shadows with visceral intensity. The lyrics are labyrinthine, doors within doors, stitched together with cult-like imagery, and cryptic symbols that invite more questions than answers. What sets Dog Race apart is their refusal to dilute these complex themes with frivolity; instead, they channel them through a vein of dark humor, a sly wink in the face of gravity.