Office Dog Release New Album ‘Prime Corner’

Office Dog’s new album Prime Corner has arrived.

The record pulls together ideas the trio have been circling for months — home, uncertainty, and what it means to put down roots.

Those themes appeared throughout recent singles “Front Row Seat”, “Gold Things”, and “Reins”, which offered an early look at a record that balances some of Office Dog’s heaviest and softest material to date.

The album’s themes are especially clear in “Reins”.

“Reins is a song about going in circles, maybe being your own worst enemy a bit, and wanting someone else to come along and steer the ship,” lead vocalist/guitarist Kane Strang said when the single arrived. “I was also back home when I wrote the words and thinking a lot about the harder, more isolating side of being in a town at the bottom of the world.”

Much of Prime Corner took shape while Strang was house-sitting in West Auckland. During that time, he started experimenting with alternate guitar tunings for the first time. He brought those ideas to bassist Rassani Tolovaa and drummer Mitchell Innes, who helped shape the tracks into the finished album.

“Gold Things” arrived early in the writing process and helped define the record’s sound and direction.“This song is about getting what you’ve wanted, or reaching a place you’ve seen off in the distance for a long time,” Strang said.

Prime Corner follows Spiel, the indie rock band’s acclaimed 2023 debut, which garnered praise across Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.

We ranked Spiel at No. 23 on our list of the 25 Best New Zealand Albums of 2023, and we later placed it at No. 42 on our 80 Best New Zealand Albums of the 2020s So Far countdown.

At that time, we wrote that Spiel offered Strang, Tolovaa, and Innes “a collaborative platform to eplore intricate sounds and existential lyricism,” as they proved themselves to be “a formidable proposition as a musical unit.”

Office Dog release Prime Corner shortly after returning from a busy UK and European tour. The run included appearances at The Great Escape and Dot to Dot Festival, alongside headline dates in Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Paris, Berlin, and London.

Despite their international reach, Strang still speaks most fondly about the community that shaped him.

“I just feel so lucky to have come into the music world that I came into there,” he told us in an interview for our recent Ōtepoti Dunedin Scene Report. “I realised there were so many people my age making really unique music. I was kind of in shock for a little bit [at] how many good songwriters were around.”

Strang and his bandmates will celebrate their new album in Dunedin this September, on a national tour that will also take them to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Ōhinehou Lyttelton, with a stop at Great Sounds Great in the capital sandwich in between (find out more here).

Office Dog’s Prime Corner is out now.