Various Artists - Pets Sounds Various Artists

15 pop songs about animals by 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. The LP comes with a full colour insert and the CD comes with a booklet featuring artwork by Elodie Ginsbourg.

Musicians spend a lot of time working at home, with their pets for company. The pets sit around, happy in their own worlds, sublimely indifferent to their humans’ 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, Your Leash Is too Long 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. These three bands are also playing a launch show at The Water Rats, London, on 9th July 2026.