Every week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week column spotlights the best new tracks from the previous seven days and takes a look at notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, you can listen to our New Sounds playlist. This week, PUP and Jeff Rosenstock join forces on the incandescent new single “Get Dumber.”
Shit feels pretty dumb right now, no? Unnecessary trade wars, jacked influencers plunging their faces into bowls of water, high-level government officials not understanding how group chats work… it doesn’t exactly seem like we’re living in an age of enlightenment. Luckily, our good pals from up north PUP have a timely new ripper for moshing while our leaders repeatedly cut themselves on Hanlon’s Razor.
Of course, “Get Dumber,” the new song from PUP’s upcoming album Who Will Look After the Dogs?, isn’t necessarily about the stupidity of 2025. The tune — which features indie-punk royalty Jeff Rosenstock — instead is a cathartic, angsty rager that sees Rosenstock and PUP frontman Stefan Babcock both grappling with the absurdity of the touring life and rebelling against put-downs from, presumably, folks with “real” jobs and 401(k)s.
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“Seventeen nights in this coffin/ No one cares if you’ve lost it/ When there’s seventeen hands in your pocket,” they scream through layers of vocal compression in the opening verse. By the next verse, they’ve turned their inward ire out: “You finally call, it’s so arrogant/ ‘You still playing those songs? It’s so embarrassing.’”
Still, while the literal lyrical content focuses on the plight of a working musician, the blistering guitar tones and shout-along choruses (“I don’t want to hear who you’re dragging under/ It seems like every year, I swear that you’re getting dumber”) speak to a universal, extremely topical disillusionment. All the while, it’s got the energy of, “I hate this shit, and the ship is going down — I don’t need YOU to tell me that.” It’s all a little too relatable if I’m being honest.
— Jonah Krueger