Here’s an observation about Dog Unit, the instrumental rock four-piece that veteran Radio X broadcaster John Kennedy has called “one of the best bands on the planet”: they just don’t stop. Their albums form continuous ribbons of motorik groove, nagging riff, and insistent hook. Far more than just writing collections of individually wound super-melodic instrumental rock songs, they make long-form swathes of music precision-engineered for a single sitting, complete with resting stops, signposts and tiny diversions in just the right places along the way.

Anyone who’s seen Dog Unit live, at their own shows or at festivals up and down the UK and in Europe, won’t be surprised by the above. Indeed, this knack for world creation has been the band’s MO since their inception, writing and performing music designed to arc over the course of an uninterrupted hour, with the four Londoners’ musical idiosyncrasies meshing for just the right recipe: Henry Scowcroft and Sam Walton on guitars that alternate between howling solo and poised melodicism; James Weaver, a pop-dub bass maestro whose minimalist style reveals a genius for conciseness; and endlessly expressive drummer Lucy Jamieson channelling krautrock tightness with every hit.

Together, on stage or on record, there’s a sense that this isn’t four musicians, but one 16-limbed creature guiding its listeners on an undulating journey of sleek modernist wonder, like a bullet train scything beautifully through unending countryside.

With their debut album At Home (Brace Yourself Records, 2024), Dog Unit wrote an suite of instrumental music that leant just as heavily on the tune-first, purist pop qualities of Burt Bacharach, Air or the Strokes as much as it did the groove and ambiance of the group’s post-rock forebears like Tortoise or Stereolab: across its 42 minutes, we were given frantic bangers and bubbling atmosphere, rise and fall, point and counterpoint, and the kind of production intricacies that only became more detailed the closer you listened.

Then, on the follow-up album Runners (Brace Yourself Records, 2026), the band took this blueprint and expanded on it in all directions, operating with greater ambition and scope, completely in charge of their own musical–emotional architecture. This time they commissioned strings and woodwind sections, as well as taking a cavalcade of new and old instruments into their studio, including vintage synths, drum machines, pianos, and a harmonium, making an entire soundworld that was richer and more nuanced with musicianship that felt simultaneously more accomplished and effortless. The band’s music is often compared to cinema, and if At Home was a charming micro-budget indie flick bursting with potential, Runners was a widescreen revelation.

Runners’s quantum leap of progress was spurred on in part by the band’s detour into purely acoustic instrumentation for the At Home, Still EP (Brace Yourself Records, 2024), which reimagined songs from their debut album entirely unplugged. That EP was Dog Unit’s first since a pair of four-song releases at the band’s outset, which began with Barking to Gospel (self-released, 2020; recorded in an afternoon and mixed by Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. Four Tet) and continued with the Turn Right And Right Again EP (Brace Yourself Records, 2022; recorded by audiobooks’ David Wrench with Hebden continuing on mixing duties).

Both those fledgling EPs drew critical acclaim from publications including The Sunday Times, MOJO, and Loud And Quiet and radio support from the likes of Steve Lamacq on 6Music and John Kennedy on RadioX, and remain lovely vignettes of the nascent Dog Unit sound, all wistful melancholia wrapped in a joyful noise. The progress of their debut album was then recognised by a flurry of breathless reviews both in the UK and across Europe, including 4 stars in The Times and MOJO, and 9/10 in Loud And Quiet, and radio support broadening to Radio 2 and Virgin Radio, as wells stalwarts 6Music and Radio X. 

The band will tour their new album extensively in 2027, including an in-the-round show at London’s prestigious ICA, where their unique live setup, in which a seated and boiler-suited quartet, play straight through in a gloriously intense unbroken performance style, will blow minds across the UK.