Stefan Babcock, lead singer of Toronto band Pup, is happily recounting the precise moment when he thought his punk rock ambitions were well and truly finished.  “We’d ended recording on the [band’s second] record and we had two days off before starting a seven-week tour,” he explains. “And on the first day, my vocal cords felt really strange; something was clearly wrong. So I went to see this doctor. They can look at your vocal cords by sticking a camera down your throat or through your nose. Once she pulled it out, she just said: ‘The dream is over.’  “I started laughing, like, ‘What the fuck, you say this to your patients?’”  Related: Indie sad lads: rock's millennial men show they have feelings too  But despite the peculiar bedside manner, the doctor’s prognosis wasn’t a laughing matter. Two years and 450 shows of relentless touring – more than double the number most bands of Pup’s size would usually manage in the time – had taken its toll. Babcock had a cyst on his vocal chords, which had haemorrhaged and was bleeding into itself. (He’s posted an image of it on Facebook, if you’re interested.) Unless he quit singing, the repercussions could be dire.  “She was like: ‘Listen, you want to be in this rock band, you want to be a singer, I get it. But it’s not going to happen any more. Sorry.’”  Babcock describes that blunt diagnosis as “a really terrible moment in my life”. It came just as a decade spent toiling in various local bands had finally begun to bear fruit. Pup’s self-titled debut album, a riot of playful riffs, exuberant gang vocals and a distinct air of post-teen angst, had been nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s answer to the Mercurys. Their frenetic tour schedule, meanwhile, has seen them graduate from back-room bars to a UK tour supporting the much-tipped punk duo Slaves and a headline North American tour that culminated in a sold-out homecoming date at Toronto’s legendary Lee’s Palace.  For Babcock, giving up everything he’d made over the past 10 years was not an option. So he ignored the doctor’s advice. “My attitude was: ‘If I’m never going to be able to sing again, I might as well just go out on stage every night until literally no sound comes out of my mouth,” he says. “And I did that.”  Six months later, at the Lexington venue in Islington, London, Babcock certainly has no trouble finding his voice. Pup are playing the final date of a co-headline UK tour with the emo outfit Modern Baseball and have just launched into a cover of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage, with Babcock yelping along while crowdsurfing. All this exuberance is in support of the band’s second album. Its name? The Dream is Over, a wry rebuke to Babcock’s doctor’s diagnosis. “She was wrong,” Babcock says. Once back in Toronto, after that vocal-shredding tour, he got a second opinion from another doctor, whose outlook was a little less gloomy: with some rest and vocal exercises, he could continue to sing in the band. “He was like: ‘It’s not good, but you can come back from this’.”  Babcock and Pup have come back, bigger and better, but also more battle-hardened. Whereas the self-titled album was filled with snotty, bratty but ultimately pop punk songs, this follow-up has a wariness and weariness to it. Musically, it feels as exuberant as before, with Babcock’s chirpy yelp bouncing alongside Steve Sladkowski’s mathematical guitar lines (the band is completed by drummer Zack Mykula and bassist Nestor Chumak). On The Dream is Over, just about every song ends in triumphant gang vocals. But lyrically, things feel a lot heavier, with violent accounts of faltering relationships and twentysomething ennui. Being in a band may be the only thing Pup know, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t alive to its drawbacks: the rootlessness and sense of stunted adolescence it can bring.  “I’ve kind of found the last few years have been a really big rollercoaster,” Babcock says. “Nine out of 10 days are fucking awesome and one out of 10 days are just horrible. There’s no middle ground when you’re in a touring band.”  What does one of those “one in 10” days look like? Babcock recalls “waking up in a Walmart parking lot somewhere in Tennessee. I’m in a van with five guys, and I don’t have any money in my wallet, and I haven’t seen my girlfriend in two months and I miss her and I feel really alone. And that’s hard. And that’s not a complaint at all, because if the pros didn’t outweigh the cons, I wouldn’t do it.”  Instead, Pup has channelled the horrors of band life into their music. The Dream Is Over opens with a screed against band life called If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will. Among the vicious lyrics therein is the memorable comment: “Every line, every goddamn syllable / That you say makes me wanna gouge out my eyes with a power drill.” Taken literally, it might prompt urgent calls for in-band counselling, but Babcock says the song is meant with affection.  Related: Modern Baseball: meet the band tackling pop-punk’s crude image  “It’s a super tongue-in-cheek song. We know how to piss each other off and we get pissed off by each other, but at the end of the day, we love each other and this is a really fun thing we’re doing together. I don’t think we could have pulled that song off if the hatred was real.”  The mock-loathing extends to the song’s video, in which the band mutilate each other in a variety of ingenious ways, before reuniting for a triumphant singalong in the emergency room. It’s the latest in a run of memorable videos, which have included the lyrics for drink-driving lament DVP reinterpreted by video-game characters and a harrowing Stand By Me-style backstory invented for the band in the Guilt Trip promo.  Most memorably of all, there’s the video for Mabu, in which Babcock enters his dilapidated car, Mabu, in a real-life destruction derby, before giving it a funeral attended by, among others, a pet chameleon borrowed from a pet shop. While the chameleon was intended purely as a prop, Babcock felt a strange spiritual bond with it.  “I was on the verge of tears, and I was holding this chameleon and I felt all of this love for this little thing. It felt like it was Mabu reincarnated. This chameleon was a filling a car-shaped hole in my heart. So I made an impulse decision that I was keeping this chameleon. I’m going to be a chameleon dad.”  He named the chameleon Norman, sticking to that moniker even after a vet told him it was a she. “Chameleons are a lot of work, but Norman was super awesome, the best pet.” But on Christmas Day, Norman suddenly started behaving strangely.  “Chameleons whip their tongues out to catch bugs,” Babcock explains. “And she was hunting and she whipped her tongue out and gashed it on the cage. The tongue got infected and she had to have it amputated, which is really bad for a chameleon. She had trouble relearning how to eat and drink and stuff like that. She seemed like she’d lost her will to live.”  Norman died soon after, and the band immortalised her in a track on The Dream Is Over called Sleep in the Heat. Its lyrics read like a break-up song, but actually refer to Norman’s sad demise. In many ways, it feels like the definitive example of a Pup song: musically, it’s buoyant, and outwardly knowing, but underneath there’s a wistfulness and weight to it. As bizarre as its subject matter is, the track is oddly moving.  “The funniest thing about that song,” Babcock says, “was when we recorded it, my girlfriend was in the studio. She heard it and said to our producer: ‘There’s one love song on this record, and it’s about his fucking chameleon.’”
Their lead singer almost lost his voice, his pet chameleon met a nasty end and the band sing about killing each other. We got in the van with the K9 rockers