Nothing But Thieves return with Stray Dogs, a rawer, more immediate record built around community, belonging and the energy of a band playing together. I put it on early in the morning. Forty-four minutes later, I felt alive again.
Every so often an album reminds you why you bother obsessing over music in the first place.
Not because it is technically perfect. Not because somebody has reinvented rock music. Not because every song needs to be dissected until there is nothing left to enjoy.
Sometimes a record simply hits you.
Stray Dogs did that to me.
I listened to Nothing But Thieves’ fifth album first thing in the morning, hardly the most rock-and-roll setting imaginable, and the opening title track immediately changed the temperature of the room. By the end of the album I felt more awake, more energised and, frankly, a little more alive than I had before pressing play.
That is ultimately why this review is a 9/10.
Stray Dogs Comes Out Swinging
The opening track is an absolute banger.
Stray Dogs runs for more than five minutes and I would happily have taken another five. It is five minutes of pure joy: big, loose, energetic and immediately alive.
There is something important about putting a song like this first. It does not politely introduce the record. It kicks the door open and tells you what sort of album you are about to hear.
That fits the thinking behind the whole project. After the more conceptual world of 2023’s Dead Club City, Nothing But Thieves wanted this album to feel rawer, more chaotic and closer to the way the band actually sounds live.
You can hear that intention almost immediately.
The instruments feel physical. The performances breathe. There is movement in the recording rather than the sensation that every edge has been polished away.
Most importantly, it sounds like a band.
Back to Where It Started
Stray Dogs is Nothing But Thieves’ fifth studio album, following Dead Club City, and there is something pleasingly circular about where they chose to make it.
The Southend band returned to Angelic Studios, the same place connected with the recording of their self-titled debut more than a decade ago.
But they returned as a completely different band.
This time there is experience behind them: years of records, tours, enormous stages and an audience that has grown alongside them.
The album was developed over a concentrated five-month period and its themes revolve around community, belonging and shared experience. Even the title begins to make sense in that context: finding your people, your pack, and recognising the strange collection of people who end up travelling through life with you.
That could easily become sentimental.
Instead, the record feels liberated by it.
Evolution Already Felt Like an Old Favourite
Evolution had an unfair advantage when I started the album.
I already loved it.
I had heard it on the radio before listening to Stray Dogs in full and it had already become one of those tracks I wanted to hear again. In the context of the album it works even better.
There is a euphoric quality to it that captures what this record does so well. It is accessible without feeling manufactured, huge without becoming sterile and polished without losing the sense that actual human beings are making the noise.
That balance runs throughout Stray Dogs.
Nothing But Thieves know how to make a massive modern rock record by now. What impresses me is that they have deliberately allowed some dirt back into the machinery.
Baby Kool Is Another Instant Highlight
Baby Kool (Evelyn) was another track I already knew before this morning and, like Evolution, it had already got its hooks into me.
It is one of the album’s more colourful moments, pulling together different influences without sounding like a band showing off how many genres it can squeeze into one song.
That is a recurring strength here. Stray Dogs can move around stylistically while still feeling like one record.
There are garage-rock edges, pop instincts, soul, blues and dreamier textures scattered across the album, but the personality of Nothing But Thieves holds everything together.
Conor Mason’s voice obviously plays a huge part in that. Few modern British rock singers can move from restraint to something enormous quite as naturally, and this record gives him plenty of room to do both.
#5 Shows the Other Side of the Album
Then there is #5.
For all the energy elsewhere, this is the song that gives the record another emotional dimension.
It is a great love song.
And crucially, it does not feel as though it has been dropped into the album simply because a rock record needs a slower emotional moment.
It belongs to the wider idea behind Stray Dogs: connection, people and the relationships that give all the noise around us some meaning.
That makes it one of my highlights, but for completely different reasons to the title track.
Stray Dogs makes me want to turn the speakers up.
#5 makes me stop and listen.
A genuinely strong album needs both.
The Production Might Be the Most Impressive Part
This is where Stray Dogs becomes particularly interesting from a recording point of view.
Guitarist and keyboard player Dominic Craik takes a major role behind the desk, with production, programming, vocal-production and mixing credits on the record. Rosie Danvers and Tommy Danvers also have production credits, while Mark Rankin and Rich Costey are among the additional engineering and mixing names involved.
So calling the album completely self-produced would oversimplify it.
But the fact that so much of its sonic identity comes from within the band makes the quality of the finished record even more impressive.
And it sounds fantastic.
The clever part is that “raw” has not been used as an excuse for sounding unfinished. STONE strike a similarly impressive balance from a scruffier punk direction on their Autonomy album.
There is grit, saturation and movement. The drums feel like drums rather than perfectly aligned samples. Guitars occupy actual space. Things distort. Things breathe. Yet when the record needs to become enormous, it absolutely does.
At Angelic Studios, the band made deliberate use of the live room, room microphones and the natural character of the space, embracing accidents and imperfections rather than trying to polish them away.
That approach matters.
In an era where it is possible to edit a performance until practically every trace of the performance has disappeared, Stray Dogs sounds refreshingly human.
A Record Designed to Feel Live
The album was deliberately structured with the movement of a live set in mind, and that explains why listening from beginning to end works so well.
There is a sense of momentum rather than twelve unrelated songs sitting next to each other.
That does not mean every track is trying to smash you over the head. The dynamics are part of the appeal. The record knows when to push and when to pull back.
What stays consistent is the feeling of people playing music together.
It sounds obvious written down.
It should not be unusual.
Yet it increasingly is.
It Made Me Feel Alive Again
This is the bit that matters more to me than microphones, consoles, production credits or genre labels.
Stray Dogs made me feel alive again.
That sounds dramatic for an album I put on early in the morning, but music is supposed to do something to you.
We spend so much time discussing whether records are innovative, whether they fit into a scene, whether the mix is good, whether the singles performed well and whether a band has progressed from the previous album that it becomes very easy to forget the most basic question.
Did it make you feel anything?
This did.
The title track made me grin. Evolution reminded me why I had loved it from the first time I heard it on the radio. Baby Kool (Evelyn) landed all over again. #5 brought genuine warmth.
And when the album finished, I wanted to play parts of it again.
That is about as useful a test of a new record as I know.
Final Verdict
Nothing But Thieves could easily have made the obvious record at this point in their career.
They have the audience. They know how to write enormous songs. They know how to make polished modern rock.
Instead, Stray Dogs reaches backwards to move forwards.
Returning to Angelic Studios, embracing the imperfections of musicians playing together and putting community at the centre of the record gives it an identity beyond simply being “the next Nothing But Thieves album”.
It is big without becoming clinical.
Emotional without becoming syrupy.
Raw without sounding rough.
And, most importantly, it is ridiculously enjoyable.
Maybe repeated listens will reveal weaknesses I did not hear this morning. Maybe different tracks will eventually replace the ones that immediately grabbed me.
But reviews should capture how a record makes you feel as well as how cleverly you can analyse it.
If you connect with that mix of energy and feeling, my Twin Atlantic Separation From The Animals review explores another album that made a strong emotional impression on me.
This morning, Stray Dogs made the world feel a little louder, brighter and more exciting.
I cannot ask much more from an album than that.
Rating: 9/10
Best tracks: Stray Dogs, Evolution, Baby Kool (Evelyn) and #5
