The lead vocalist for Halifax-based Dog Day had been crafting melancholic indie rock tunes with his wife Nancy Urich and a rotating cast of band members since before Dog Day's 2007 debut, Night Group. But after their 2013 record Fade Out, Smith succumbed to the burnout of keeping up with his band. Rather than continuing with something he was losing passion for, Smith and Ulrich focused their efforts on another storytelling medium—film.
“There’s been times where we just wanted to take a bit of time away, meditate, do something else,” says Smith in an interview with The Coast. “And then when you come back to it, it’s just more interesting.”
And return they did. Even while focusing on films such as the award-winning The Crescent in 2017, the couple still wrote songs and gathered material, and after a seven-year-long hiatus, came back with founding member KC Spidle to release 2020’s Present.
With a reinvigorated passion fueling their efforts, Dog Day is still proving to listeners that they’re one of Halifax’s best indie bands on their brand-new record, A T-Shirt With Writing on It. Released on July 26, the band pulled back on what they were used to—mainly synths—and honed in on the guitar, bass and drums, executing a tone that could be described as noisy, yet beautiful.
In a way, it was a return to form for Dog Day—back to when they didn’t have a single record out.
“This is kind of like our first record without keyboards,” says Smith. “I mean, we first started Dog Day as a three-piece. We didn’t release anything as a three-piece, but it was kind of guitar-based.”
It didn’t take long for the band to add in a keyboardist, Crystal Thili, in time to record their debut, so this new record is the first in Dog Day’s history where synths are nowhere to be found.
“[It] made things a little simpler, and I guess I could focus a little more on, you know, guitar tones and noise, which is kind of interesting, because when you have a lot of instruments, they all kind of compete for the mix,” says Smith. “I really like keyboards. They smooth things out a lot, and they’re very beautiful and haunting, but there’s a starkness with bass and guitar that’s kind of striking and kind of fun.”
Going for gloom
A T-Shirt With Writing on It plays with several themes throughout its 30-minute run—relationships, love, mental health, finding new interests and entering new eras of your life—all very personal to Smith, and adding to the gloomy atmosphere Dog Day is known for.
While Smith says they try to shrug off the constraints of genre, he strives for a moody tone that is resonant but not melodramatic.
“It’s all heavy stuff, but also, you know, we try not to take anything too seriously,” Smith explains. “[We] try to be playful with the lyrics, and [the] music, we like to have walked up balances, meaning and meaningless, because it’s all just a joke at the end of the day.”
The record is emblematic of this effort, going between pop-punk inspired guitar passages with lyrics that lie on a spectrum between somber and witty. Their sound is rounded out with Spidle on drums, recorded in Smith and Urich’s new skull-shaped studio, Homeskull, which they built with Spidle in mind.
“We actually built the room in a weird way, so it would have a good drum sound, and I was pretty happy with that,” says Smith. “Usually for the drums, we kind of suck all the room out of it and keep them very dry, but for this record, we really leaned into the room sound, which is pretty cool when you get to build your own room.”
Smith, Ulrich and Spidle will be performing alongside talented bassist and long-time friend Vee Bell for a show at the Marquee Ballroom on Saturday, Aug. 24. Smith says the Marquee is where he played his very first show while it was still being renovated, making it all the more exciting for him to come back and show off what the band has to offer after nearly two decades.
“We’re excited to do this,” says Smith, “and hopefully another few shows down the road, if we’re lucky.”
