No Dogs in Space Returns With Season Four, 'Punk 2.0,' Opening on the New York Dolls

Hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks told The Verge the show is getting "back to basics," in part because they consider punk rock the area where their passion and expertise are strongest. Parks said they had considered ranging widely and that "I wanted to do Beethoven at one point," but that "we realize like what we do best is tell a punk story, right? Not the punk story, but a punk story." The two said punk also simply offers the most interesting stories; after translating large amounts of German into English for an earlier experimental rock series, they concluded that the story behind a band often comes down to "art school kids fucking around."

The gap since the previous season had several causes, among them false starts. The original plan was a series on the Washington, D.C., punk scene, which Hidalgo said they worked on for more than six months, intending to launch it with Bad Brains. "And then we look into them," Hidalgo said, "and they're like, incredibly homophobic. Like, fire and brimstone." She added that many bands the show covers are "problematic," but that Bad Brains was "a really tough one to focus on."

The hosts then tried to cover Washington as a whole. Hidalgo warned against the approach: "never do that." Parks said the scope "just kept swelling larger," drawing in figures such as Chuck Brown and go-go, which were not part of the punk scene but were foundational to the city's music; the two even discussed whether Georgetown University's WGTB radio warranted a series of its own. "When you try to put all of them together, you can't. You just can't put all of these stories together," Parks said, adding that after eight months of work "we eventually had to admit defeat." The effort was not wasted: it produced a two-part series on Link Wray that will premiere later this year.

As in past seasons, the show's digressions carry much of the material. While working on the New York Dolls series, Hidalgo became absorbed by Mott the Hoople, best known for the David Bowie-penned "All the Young Dudes." She said lead singer Ian Hunter "was just a guy digging ditches. And then he got a call from a friend who said, 'Hey, there's a band, and like, they're not very good, and they need a new lead singer,' and so he just showed up." Hunter also wrote "Cleveland Rocks," which was covered by The Presidents of the United States of America and became the theme for The Drew Carey Show.

Parks said he became focused on the drag queen Jackie Curtis. "It could be argued that the punk style that is often credited to Richard Hell probably actually originated with Jackie Curtis," he said. He also described how Curtis once "went out on to [their] windowsill ... like Batman, inching like Batman" to enter the apartment of a recently deceased neighbor and take her clothes before the coroner arrived.

Parks attributed the show's approach to the hosts' own fixations. "We live our lives in like a state of obsession," he said. "Obsession really is, it is kind of our superpower. And we were both recently diagnosed with autism and discovered that that's just who we are. That's the superpower that we get."

New episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms. For the first time, the show is also being posted on YouTube as full video episodes. The Verge noted that the New York Dolls series, along with earlier seasons on the Replacements, Dead Kennedys and Joy Division, are reasonable starting points for new listeners.