Dogs in a Pile, the Jersey Shore-based jam band that is quickly climbing the ranks of the national music scene, may be playing venues like the Stone Pony nowadays, but the group doesn’t forget its musical roots.
“One of the things we’ve always been about, from when the band first started, is that all of our fans were just our friends, and they were just enjoying having their buddies’ band playing backyards and stuff,” says bassist Sam Lucid, a Sea Girt native. “And it’s always been a super-close family vibe, and that’s what we try to portray to new people.”
Dogs in a Pile is currently touring in support of Distroid, which came out last year.
The quintet of accomplished and ambitious 20-somethings is performing at the storied spot in Asbury Park for the third consecutive year, with its 2026 show slated for Saturday, August 8. The group is currently on the road in support of their third LP, Distroid, released in November 2025.
“We had the freedom to make it sound exactly how we wanted to,” singer and guitarist Jimmy Law, a Point Pleasant native, says of the album.
Distroid—produced by the band’s keyboard player, Jeremy Kaplan—sounds true to the Dogs experience, coming close to capturing the band’s buzzworthy live show. There are tricky stylistic shifts, such as the driving-country-to-chill-reggae transition of “Shenanigans,” as well as sprawling epics like the grandiose “Thomas Duncan, Pt. 3,” and plenty of Jersey swagger in the Ocean Avenue Stompers horns-assisted “My Disguise.”
“Every single one of those dudes are like the best at what they do—so when you put them all together like that, that’s a serious force,” says Jersey Shore tastemaker Tim Donnelly, a journalist and event producer who cofounded the annual Sea Hear Now festival in Asbury Park, which featured Dogs in a Pile in 2022.
The band’s current lineup—Law, Lucid, and Forked River-native drummer Joe Babick, alongside Kaplan and guitarist/singer Brian Murray, both from Long Island—have been together since 2019. But, as Donnelly notes, Law had been making waves on Asbury Park stages since his preteen years.
“Everybody knew about Jimmy, and then all of a sudden this band gets put together and Jimmy’s a part of something, he’s not the [only] thing,” Donnelly says. “That was really amazing to me, just to see the talent level of all of these guys and how they’re able to push each other, but more importantly, in how they do it in that whole Grateful Dead kind of improvisational situation. You can’t teach that stuff—it’s got to be there inherently, and they have that, and that is rare. Bands work their whole lives to do that.”
Photographer Jay Blakesberg, a Clark native best known for his images of the Grateful Dead, first saw Dogs in a Pile at the Peach festival in Pennsylvania in 2022 and has been a fan ever since.
Noting how the band borrowed its name from a Grateful Dead lyric, in the song “He’s Gone,” Blakesberg says, “I think that everybody expects them to be a Grateful Dead tribute band, and they’ve got that music deep in their veins as young kids, but they are not…. They’re just rock-solid, really good, improvisational, groovy jam-band music that’s got their own twist.”
Blakesberg, whose musical history with Asbury Park dates back to seeing the Jerry Garcia Band at Convention Hall in 1977, says Dogs in a Pile has found their place in the city’s musical landscape. “Asbury Park’s just got the vibe, and now they’ve got the band,” he says.
The demand is evidenced by the band’s touring schedule across the country and their growing Dog Pound Facebook fan group.
“Thinking about the fans and how supportive they are can really help you,” says Lucid. “As a touring musician, it’s easy to get discouraged, but when you think about, We can write these songs, and people are singing them back to us and loving them and posting on Facebook, that that song really brightened their day or changed their life in a small way—that’s really what it’s all about.”
