Pond Get Stung!
On the cusp of their tenth studio album, Pond’s enigmatic and eccentric frontman, Nick Allbrook, dives deep into what makes the psychedelic rockers tick and the magic that went into making the wide and whimsical stung!
Words by Zara Richards | Image by Michael Tartaglia
Despite being four years into a world where Zoom calls are a norm form of communication, technical problems still plague the start of our conversation with Pond’s frontman, Nick Allbrook.
The Perth-born, psychedelic-rockers are currently on tour in America, holed up in a hotel room in Berkeley, California. Outdated devices and dodgy hotel Wi-Fi are the culprits of our crackly line, but the eccentric vocalist is apologetic when he finally joins the call. “I’m sorry I’m really late,” he says. “All my devices are old and fucked and I can’t buy any new stuff, so I’m sort of just scrambling through.”
It’s a surprisingly relatable confession from a globetrotting muso on the cusp of releasing album number 10. But the failing techs of this interview aren’t an indicator of where Pond are in their career right now. In fact, the five-piece have never been surer in how they sound.
On June 21, Pond – comprising Jay ‘Gum’ Watson, ‘Shiny’ Joe Ryan, Jamie Terry, James ‘Gin’ Ireland and Nick – will drop the wide, whimsical and wonderful Stung! via Spinning Top Records. It’s their longest body of work yet – 14 tracks that navigate the everyday whiplash of existing in a universe built on equal parts disappointment and love.
“It’s about how we move through the world as people,” Nick explains. “How we can be hurt and scared yet just keep appreciating humanity and the planet. You get beat down, but you develop bigger and more robust resources to be happy again and again and again. You just keep doing it until you die.”
“That’s kind of where some of the silliness and lightness [of Stung!] comes through – the absurd comedy of the whole thing. It’s kind of the only home base I find myself being able to get to when you look at the scope of tragedy and redundancy. Humour and love and relationships and people make it all worth it.”
Pond are one of the brightest talents to emerge from Perth’s hotbed of psychedelic experimentation – a standout in the city’s technicolour sonic centre. They arrived in the Australian music scene with a zap of energy in 2009’s Psychedelic Mango, a debut album that feels dizzy from feverishly pogoing between genres.
The five-piece still play the fuzzy, space rock song ‘Don’t Look At The Sun (Or You’ll Go Blind)’ from that record in sets today. However, Pond’s sprawling, multi-hyphenate catalogue has become less concerned with the silly nonsensical side of psychedelia as time passes. Yes, experimentation is still chief. But on records like The Weather and Tasmania, the band wrap a tight mix of hallucinogenic haze, glam-garage noises and synth-pop notes around their world-weary thoughts on humanity.
The 57 minutes of Stung! follows suit. However, the sound of this record also serves as a reminder that there’s reason to smile when shit heads south – a point of view, Nick ponders, potentially spurred on by the pandemic.
“Having such a temperamental period where you had this flimsy grasp on what you’re doing, what it means and if there’s any point to it, ushered us in a direction of really enjoying each other’s company,” he says. “A lot of the songs have that bright, bushy-tailed sound. The lyrics are grim as hell, but the sound of what we did together is pretty boppy.”
The blueprint of Stung! was built over a series of Wednesday jams in Jay’s backyard studio – a collaborative circle time for the band scheduled between kindy drop-offs and work. Here, the seeds of songs planted in bandmembers’ brains had space to flourish and be fleshed out. “[But] there was no idea of Stung! when we were doing the Wednesdays because a week is long enough for our tiny pea brains to forget everything that happened at the last one,” confesses Nick. So, the band headed to the sun-soaked coastline of Dunsborough, WA, to connect the disjointed yet deliciously unfettered fragments of what would become Stung!.
Nick shrugs off the suggestion that the sandy location had anything to do with the expansive sound weaved throughout the record. Instead, he says the free-flowing energy arrived from the fun the five-piece had during these secluded 10 days of experimentation and play. “I mean, [playing together] is the best part of it all,” he says.
The result is a record that’s stamped with a groove that makes dire situations dance-worthy. It’s easy to forget the pain tangled in lyrics like ‘Haunted by a child brittle as paper / And now my future is just a vapour / Writ in such cruel detail,’ when listening to the funk-laden rhythm of the song ‘So Lo’.
Stung! also delivers a radiant title track; an acoustic 36-second palate cleanser in ‘Stars in Silken Sheets’; a futuristic, synth-heavy instrumental track titled ‘Elf Bar Blues’; and the eight-minute opus, ‘Edge of the World. Pt 3’. ‘Who do we have to eat? / Who do we have to kill? / To get our foot in the doorway of the house at the top of the hill?’ cries its chorus line – an ominous response to the previous two iterations pressed on 2017 record The Weather.
Pond will take to Lion Arts Factory on June 27 as part of their Australian tour in celebration of Stung!, supported by Adelaide outfit Coldwave. The album, right now, exists in a weird liminal space between pre-release and public discourse. But Nick’s not nervous about the reviews – he’s itching for people to digest and interpret this collection of songs.
“It’s exciting,” he says. “[Stung!] is such a broad thematic thing it’s hard when people ask you what it’s about – it’s [about] everything. I’m really looking forward to everyone writing their own stories into it.”
Perhaps it’s a point-of-view that can only arrive from a band sitting comfortably in the second decade of their career. But Nick thinks this confidence also has something to do with the magic of making music in the company of his people. “It’s the only thing that makes [Pond] work,” he says. “I love and am moved by music, more now than at the beginning probably – or just as much, I don’t know. It still feels exciting.
“And it’s about not being beholden to the tides of popular opinion. We’re kind of intoxicated by the feeling that we might be improving. At the end of every record, it’s like quick, quick, quick, let’s get onto the next one because we’ve got some really good ideas. We’re giddy to get [started] and when we’re not, I just don’t think we will.”
See Pond play at Lion Arts Factory this June 27. Tickets on sale now via Moshtix.
