B-Side Guys

Somewhere in the DNA of “ROAD DOG” is a Norm Macdonald joke, which is about the most accurate thing you can say about a song that opens with “woke up / no luck / got nothing” and somehow pivots to “too slick / too rich / too fit” within the next four lines. The narrator has nothing, knows it, and has decided to act otherwise. The gap between those two positions is where the whole song lives.

Pretty Moi are a Melbourne six-piece with roots in Brisbane, blending 60s psychedelia, classic soul, and a general willingness to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. “ROAD DOG” is the version of that instinct applied to storytelling: absurdist, light on its feet, and fully committed to a character who is maybe one notch more delusional than the situation warrants. “Switchblade / all gas / no brakes” reads like a man describing himself in a way nobody asked for, which is its own kind of comedy.

The pre-chorus is where the song earns something genuinely affecting underneath the slapstick. “He was a dog among men / flying high like there’s nothing / and nothing ever comes to an end” carries real warmth for this fictional rolling stone, someone whose memory rings through precisely because he never seemed to think the good times were finite. The nursery rhyme callback, “paddy whack knick knack give that dog a bone,” shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Pretty Moi play it completely straight, which is somehow funnier than winking at the camera.

By the time “old dog keep your eyes on the road” cycles through the outro four times, the joke and the eulogy have become the same thing. That’s a harder trick to pull off than it sounds, and the fact that it happens inside a song this breezy is kind of the whole point.