Pond will release new album '9' on October 1st.
The ever-industrious group have developed a singular catalogue, melding together hallucinogenic guitar tones with punchy songwriting.
New album '9' offers another visit to their ever-expanding universe, with songwriter Nick Allbrook stating that the band "gave ourselves permission to make something stuffed this time…"
"We'd settled into a pretty tight routine with the last few albums and wanted to shake a boat with this so we started off with filling a few tape reels with some absolutely heinous improvised sonic babble which, after much sifting, became the first few songs of the album. We also wanted to up the tempo," he adds.
"The last few albums have a neat little mantra or repetitive theme. If I was forced to find something like that in '9', I guess it would be ‘biography’ or ‘observation’ – a lot of the lyrics seem to focus on single people's lives, or the lives of small moments or small things when you zoom real close up and they reveal something deeper. Stuff like my cheap Chinese slippers, or a soiled teddy bear, or Agnes Martin (not to put them in the same category, although maybe Agnes would've appreciated it)."
"In the Rorschach test of re-reading lyrics, one thing that sticks out is a fixation on leaving behind a time of golden optimism and uncynical abandon. We can't look at ourselves the same anymore, and the world we've built provides a scary lens for viewing our past."
Breezy new single 'America's Cup' is online now, a punchy return with what Allbrook terms "a New York street strut, Sesame Street style".
Lyrically, it's actually a punch against the gentrification of his home in Fremantle, and how generation shifts can become metaphors for personal growth – or the opposite.
Tune in now.
‘9’ tracklisting:
1. Song For Agnes
2. Human Touch
3. America’s Cup
4. Take Me Avalon I’m Young
5. Pink Lunettes
6. Czech Locomotive
7. Rambo
8. Gold Cup / Plastic Sole
9. Toast
Photo Credit: Matsu
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