This is music that has been raised out in the cold and hardened in the bitter wind... lean, sinewy and mean. It’s heavy, but close to the skin; elegant and graceful, but never quite too pretty. It’s music that gets dark early.
Dogs of Winter came to be during the faint nights of a December in Brooklyn. After a decade of working together in various projects and temporary situations, childhood friends Dave Valle (drums) and Brian Grosz (guitars, vocals) came together in a basement studio and began to meticulously workshop their material. Grosz was recovering from a broken hand -- a heavily medicated month-long stretch in a plaster cast during which he sketched out an album’s worth of material using only five fingers and a piano. The songs quickly evolved from sparse, sketch-like compositions into the realm of towering guitars, thunderous drums and gravel-ragged vocals.
Their sound combines the soaring dynamics of the Deftones with the guitar-rock swagger of Queens of the Stone Age. They toy with the experimentation of Quicksand and bathe in the gravel-pits of Jawbreaker without abandoning the hooks of a Foo Fighters anthem. Their influences reach far and wide, but they always come back to the fundamental question: is it raw?
It's primal, it's loud, and it's libidinous. The music is straining against the collar around its neck, yearning to break loose and roam free.