Raise your glass to The Rills’ impish indie rock anthem “Stardog”

The Rills’ appeal all lies with their kitchen-sink realism and the all-important quality of not taking themselves too seriously. In the space of six months, the band have had a meteoric rise on TikTok with over 5 million views with their tongue-in-cheek takes on the indie scene which worked up an appetite for the very same qualities in their music.

After their previous livewire single, “The Angler”, a shot taken at the lad you wish you wish you never met on a night out, frontman Mitch Spencer fixes his writer’s eye on a different cultural identity: ‘Stardog’. He explains: “The Stardog is an amalgamation of the small town dealers that I knew growing up in Lincoln. He’s very much a big fish in a small pond. The more quiet and boring the place, the more likely you are to find drugs in my experience – Stardog is the embodiment of that; works a normal job on weekdays but becomes a satirical Pablo Escobar at the weekends.”

As its rollicking chorus gives way, The Rills ramp up the tension with the breakdown, which, Mitch shares, was recorded through a real phone from the studio toilet. It’s decisions like that which capture the spirit of The Rills: authentic, but not without a bit of a laugh.