We had an iconic ’90s hit that went platinum before going off the radar. Can you guess who we are?

You couldn’t escape their massive hit in the early 2000s that won them a Grammy award and went triple platinum. And 25 years later, we bet you still know it. 

The nine-member band’s famous song recently appeared in a Spruce Super Bowl ad for a pet-friendly weed killer that is safe for pets to sniff around and play in the yard while it dries. 

This reggae musical group, which hails from the Bahamas, has more than 25 gold and platinum awards, was the first Bahamians to win a Grammy in 2000 and became an overnight success with a raunchy song about creepy men hitting on women. 

Do you know who they are? 

Need another hint? Did anyone ever ask you the question: ‘Who let the dogs out?’ 

So ‘who, who, who, who, who’ is this? 

The Baha Men! 

And what are they up to 25 years after their smash hit? Well, they’re back in the studio, and they dished to DailyMail.com all about their upcoming projects. 

All nines of the band have holed themselves up in Nassau, Bahamas – their hometown city – this week and the next to work on new songs, but they aren’t promising an album just yet. 

‘I can’t say an album just yet, but you know, we have a slew of singles that we’ve been putting out. We never really stopped,’ singer Rik Carey told the DailyMail.com. 

‘So we’re back in the studio creating with an awesome producer… We’re just keeping it going, you know, with the music, doing what we love.’ 

This time around, they’re looking to incorporate more Bahamian style into their sound, which includes goatskin drums, horns and whistles. 

‘We always try to fuse everything with our local sound, which is junkanoo,’ Carey, who still resides in the Bahamas, said. ‘This sound that we are working with now is definitely more Bahamian culturally [and] rhythmically driven.’ 

Fellow singer Dyson Knight told the DailyMail.com that they ‘love to show off’ their culture, especially as the Bahamas is a tourist destination. 

‘That’s an opportunity to show off our culture,’ he said. 

Although nine’s a party in the studio, they insist they like it that way and have a ‘natural chemistry’ with each other, as one does after more than two decades together. 

‘I could do a good song by myself. Ric could do a good song by himself, but when you have nine excellent musicians that come together to do one song, it’s going to sound as if nine geniuses came together to do one song,’ Knight told the DailyMail.com. 

‘That’s the difference between us doing a solo project and us doing a Baha Men project, because it’s just so many brilliant musicians coming together on those records. It makes a huge difference.’ 

With such a large group, they naturally find themselves dividing into two groups: artists and entertainers. 

For Knight and Carey, they identify as artists, and they take their time in the studio seriously, working endlessly to craft something new and beautiful. 

Herschel Small, Pat Carey, and Anthony ‘Monks’ Flowers also fall in this category. The others, they say, are the entertainers who come and do as they’re told, but really thrive on stage. 

‘Others are like: “Just show me what to play, just tell me this is what you want.” Which is excellent too, because they do as they’re told very, very well,’ Knight, who joined the band in 2006, said. 

‘We kind of meet in the middle, and I think we end up just getting a vibe that’s genuine.’ 

Another difference in their upcoming music is that ‘we’re just not singing about dancing in these records,’ Knight said. 

One thing they’re not trying to do is recreate their most famous song, Who Let The Dogs Out.  

‘If you try to duplicate, it doesn’t come off genuine,’ Carey told DailyMail.com. ‘The song is over 20 years old and it’s still slapping… [but] I’ve never been one to want to recreate something that has already created an energy of its own. 

‘We were never on that whole: “Okay, we need another Who Let The Dogs Out.” If it comes up, that’s great, but we would just always focus on just creating good music.’ 

‘We work really hard in the studio,’ Knight agreed. ‘We don’t want to short change it and be flippant about the exercise.’ 

If they were to have a song become as successful as Who Let The Dogs Out – which has amassed 172.45 million streams on Spotify – ‘it would be a plus,’ Knight said. 

They also want to provide feel-good songs, especially amongst the dark background of the world overview lately. 

‘There’s a war here, there’s terrorists there, and people are getting frustrated,’ Knight told the DailyMail.com. ‘The artist wants people to relax, the artist wants people to reconnect with yourself, with your inner being, and realize a lot of these things are external. 

‘It’s what’s internal, that’s what matter more, like the family you spend time with that’s right in your house, the beach that you can walk on, the garden that you can smell flowers. These things are important.’ 

But it’s more than just giving people a happy song to listen to, like their latest single Smile, but also proving to other creatives on the Bahamian islands that they, too, can make it. 

‘We’re island boys,’ Knight told DailyMail.com. ‘We have a 50-year culture, we’ve been the Bahamas only for 50 years. 

‘We’re very, very young and for the Baha Men to have the international and global success that it has is something that we want to platform the message to young artists, Bahamians, or small island people, Caribbean people that it is possible to have this level of success.

‘I just want the Baha Men’s legacy to be that it is the success story that says that as a Bahamian, as a young Caribbean person, you can make it in music, you can make it in the arts.’

The making of their hit song

Their most popular song still remains Who Let The Dogs Out, followed by Best Years Of Our Lives, which appeared in Shrek, which has 11million streams on Spotify. 

Who Let The Dogs Out was originally released by Trinidadian singer Anslem Douglas under the name Doggy. 

In 1999, producer Steve Greenberg approached the Baha Men with the soon-to-be massive hit and Isaiah Taylor, the band’s leader, thought it was crazy. 

‘You’ve got to be crazy. I thought the man was out of his mind, but thank god he wasn’t,’ Taylor told Vice in 2021. 

Douglas recorded the song in 1997 for a festival the next year in Trinidad. The song was inspired by his radio DJ brother-in-law who used to ask: ‘Who let the dogs out?’ when he got home. 

When he got in the studio with Ossie Gurley, a producer, he decided to make it a ‘revenge song.’ 

‘I tried to do a social commentary as a party song,’ Douglas told Vice. ‘But the party song overshadowed the social commentary aspect of it.’ 

And he’s not wrong. Many couldn’t tell you the meaning behind the song, which is about asking the age-old question of who let creepy men into the bar. 

Greenberg asked the Baha Men to do the song and Taylor refused, telling him that they weren’t a cover band.  

However, tragedy struck when the lead’s frontman Nehemiah Hield quit the band and Greenberg left London Records after the company turned down the song. 

Rik Carey, whose dad is also in the band, stepped up to take the lead, but he didn’t always believe in the song. 

‘Because I was new to the game, I already had all this in front of me, so I was more focused on just getting it right,’ Carey told the DailyMail.com. ‘I didn’t want to disappoint the guys. I didn’t want to disappoint the fans of Baha Men. 

‘It was my first time really getting into something this big, so I didn’t feel it when I did it.’ 

After the song was a fast success and he found himself in New York City’s Central Park performing it, he realized just how big it actually was. 

‘I didn’t realize until probably that moment that “oh damn, this song is really that big,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘That’s when I realized: “Okay, yeah, s**t is real.”

‘But I had no idea in the studio, [I did] realize this song was going to be this big, man.’ 

Greenberg went on to create his own label to prove the industry wrong. He made deals with sports teams to play the song at games, such as the New York Yankees and Mets. 

From there, the song took off and the band was asked to play the song at games and other places. 

And the rest is history.