Suburban Dogs

This one carries more grit than most Real Estate material — the guitars are slightly dirtier, the tempo a touch more propulsive, and the whole thing has a loose, almost live-room quality that feels genuinely suburban in the way a summer night in a driveway feels suburban: unheroic, warm, faintly restless. "Suburban Dogs" evokes the particular energy of teenagers with nowhere to go, circling the same blocks, filling time, the boredom carrying its own strange electricity. There's a youthfulness to the playing that later records sand down — mistakes left in, edges unpolished — that makes this feel like a document as much as a song. Courtney sounds younger here, his voice less settled, and that uncertainty works in the song's favor. The guitars interlock in Real Estate's signature way but with more edge, less patience. Lyrically it seems to explore the social choreography of small-town youth — who belongs, who gets left out, the territorial logic of neighborhoods — but without judgment, more like testimony. This is music for a humid August night when you're seventeen and driving nowhere in particular, the radio loud, everything feeling simultaneously too small and completely sufficient.