Pets Sounds
a Skep Wax compilation album of songs about pets
Various Artists
Vinyl/CD
Release date: 17 July 2026
15 pop songs about animals, featuring 15 of the best indiepop bands in the world. Pets Sounds is as simple as that. Ranging from the playful (Sassyhiya, Gay Skeleton Club) to the heartbreaking (Caleb Nichols, Jetstream Pony) to the enigmatic (Railcard, Oh Hippo) to the satiric (The Magnetic Fields, Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires), there’s more diversity on this album than you can shake a stick at. Or throw a bone at.
Musicians spend a lot of time working at home, with their pets for company. The animals sit around, happy in their own worlds, sublimely indifferent to their humans’ earnest musical endeavours. As familiar as family members, but as unknowable as aliens, pets are the perfect muse. They can be treated as objects of adoration – ‘Rufus’ by Tugboat Captain is an expression of pure joy – or they can be treated as metaphors. More reliable than lovers but less dangerous than heroin, pets are a great vehicle for singing obliquely about something else. Swansea Sound’s ‘I Don’t Like Men In Uniform’ is about an ageing, irascible terrier, but it’s also about men striving to maintain their potency as territorial aggressors. The Magnetic Fields’ Fido is a libidinous and unreliable partner, as well as a dog that likes sniffing other dogs’ private parts.
For the most part, animals come off better than humans on this album. In ‘Kings Of The Animal Kingdom’, The Burning Hell dramatise our indulgent love of pets in order to expose our cruelty to other human beings. In ‘Bo’s New Haircut’, The Cords express the injustice and unfairness of an innocent animal having to submit to human demands. In ‘Crayon Potato’ by Sassyhiya, the magnificent Crayon contemptuously rejects the gifts offered by her besotted human owners.
In ‘Lola’, the opening track, Lande Hekt tries to put this enigmatic human-animal relationship into words. And concludes that however much we love our animals, and no matter how much we manage to communicate with them, we can never really know them. A melancholy conclusion maybe, but the music – as with all the songs on this album – is expressive of the wonderment and the joy that comes from sharing your life with a member of another species.
The tracks by Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires, Jetstream Pony and Railcard are previously unreleased.
To mark the LP release, we are releasing a new single from it by the wonderful Jetstream Pony, with their song ‘Grimalkin Tom’.
TRACKLIST
01. LANDE HEKT – Lola
02. BRIAN BILSTON AND THE CATENARY WIRES – Under A Cat
03. THE CORDS – Bo’s New Haircut
04. RAILCARD – Foxy
05. TUGBOAT CAPTAIN – Rufus
06. SPECIAL FRIEND – Breakfast
07. CALEB NICHOLS – Dark Age
08. GAY SKELETON CLUB – 2 Cats
09. JETSTREAM PONY – Grimalkin Tom
10. SWANSEA SOUND – I Don’t Like Men In Uniform
11. THE BURNING HELL – Kings Of The Animal Kingdom
12. SASSHIYA – Crayon Potato
13. OH HIPPO – Orlando
14. U.S. HIGHBALL – Marjorie Says
15. THE MAGNETIC FIELDS – Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long
ONLINE LISTENING PARTY – just RSVP Fri 17 July 2026 at 8:00 PM GMT+1
Press Release copied & pasted by Ged Babey for LTW
Apologies to Rob & Amelia Skep-Wax it is just TOO Twee for me to review with any honesty. Some great tracks, but… x And, as we all know, this is the best song about a pet cat – that goes missing…. (GB)
and this one…
and if we are talking dogs, this…
and this one and this…
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