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POND
release new single
“SO LO”
from anticipated new album
STUNG!OUT FRIDAY 21 JUNE VIA SPINNING TOP RECORDS
Touring Australia June / July 2024
+ Announce North American Tour Dates
AUS TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW AT POND.BAND
PRE-ORDER STUNG! HERE
“rimming with fuzzed-out guitar tones, bombastic drumming, and alluring sonic trickery.”
– UPROXXLISTEN TO “SO LO” NOW
Ahead of their Australian shows next month, and fresh off a run of US tour dates including a performance at Kilby Court Festival, Pond has released another taste of their highly anticipated tenth studio album Stung!, out Friday 21 June via Spinning Top Records. “So Lo” is a sizzling bit of art-house funk, New York cool and Berlin brutalism recombined in a giddy romp. “So Lo” is out today along with an animated facial capture visualizer, by Alejandro Crawford who also worked with Pond on the video for their quintessential track “Paint Me Silver”. Listen here and watch the visualizer below.
Pond’s Nick Allbrook on “So Lo” “I think Gum was just messing around on guitar playing something fun and cheesy and then realized it could be cool in a kind of cold, concrete, No-Wave way. I wrote the line about white dreads while waiting for a bus in Tottenham – maybe there were some hippies around, maybe there weren’t, who can really say where hippies are or aren’t at any given time… The words were “all these tablets got me breaking in two” but when I first double tracked the vocals they were a bit out of time and gum thought I said, “these tummy tablets got me breaking in two” which made us laugh, and thus, by the laws of Pond, became official. Some of the lyrics are sad honestly, about watching your future as you’d imagined it evaporate before your eyes – being haunted by “a child as brittle as paper”. Gum thought I was saying “horny badger, brittle as paper” but that was a bridge too far, even for us. This song sort of skirts between being horrendously bleak and really dumb. The vocoder Gin and Gum put on “so European” absolutely kills me.”
Pond have just wrapped up a run of make-up tour dates in the USA and are now preparing to bring their energetic live show home, kicking off their anticipated Australian tour at Sydney’s Carriageworks on Friday 14 June before igniting stages in Hobart, Adelaide, Melbourne
The band are also excited to today announce an extensive North American album tour with support from New Zealand musician, Fazerdaze. Starting in Boston on 12 November and making stops in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, DC, Toronto, San Francisco, LA and more. This follows a fifteen-date run of UK/Europe throughout September and October. All tour dates and ticket details can be found HERE.
Last month, the band released the second single from the new album, “(I’m) Stung”. Consequence described the song as “warm and whimsical” and it was called out as a song of the week at Under the Radar and Paste Magazine.
The last four Pond albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity, 10 ideas always tucked into 40 minutes or so. But on Stung!, they gleefully, madly, and willfully lean into double-LP largesse, tapping the spirit of Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times by funneling 14 songs into the most unfettered and splendid hour of their recording career. A band for the better part of two decades, Pond has accepted (with no small joy or relief) that they are no longer beholden to shifting expectations of cool. That idea has empowered them, allowing them to play precisely what they want, to not move toward any goal but being themselves.
On Stung! you’ll find some of Pond’s most glorious rock songs ever and also some of their least rock moments, all psychedelic drapery or funk vim. In that epic, as in Stung! at large, Allbrook speaks to our collective modern paradox of being disappointed in or even disconsolate over a world that we know more about than any prior generation but also being in awe of it and (sometimes) each other, too. There are so many reasons to cry and so many reasons to marvel. Can’t they all, Pond suggests with Stung!, be reasons to sing?
It takes more effort for Pond to make a record these days—not musically, of course, but logistically. They’re all adults with relationships, children, professions, hobbies, side-projects, or some mix of them all. (To wit, Allbrook and Jay Watson, or GUM, both released solo albums last year, and GUM will release a collaborative full-length album with Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs mid-2024.) They began making Stung! in piecemeal fashion, then, a member or two showing up at the little studio in Watson’s back yard to work on a new idea. They’d tinker joyously and endlessly in Watson’s little workshop, trying a panoply of machines and widgets to get the most interesting sounds. What’s more, they were able to let the songs they had sit over time, so that Pond’s deeply democratic process could not only siphon and improve the best ones but also tease out what they might be missing for this very full double-record.
At last, they realised they ran the risk of being stuck in this phase—creation, adjustment, addition—forever. The whole quintet decamped to Dunsborough, the scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast where a friend had recently finished a spacious and state-of-the-art studio. Allbrook would run near the shore each morning. They’d all swim during the day, then record until deep in the night. They left most of their ancillary gear at home, forcing them to drill down on the songs, ideas and sounds they already had, to make them better without getting carried away in endless possibility. After all, after nearly a year of writing and workshopping, they had plenty of material, the makings of a set more expansive than any previous Pond album.
The title Stung! began as a joke in Pond, a reference to having a crush on someone or something that they began to use so often they simply had to make it the name. They still laugh when they hear it now, a silly inside wisecrack suddenly open to the outside world. But it’s kind of a credo, too: despite the bruises, the callousness, and the suffering, they remain stung with music, with the idea of making songs that feel just so and doing it together, as friends. And they are stung with the world, too, even when it bites back. “Well, I’m stung/the bells been rung,” Allbrook sings during the winning title track. “If love’s a game, then I guess you won.” Ten albums in, though, Pond seems to be having more fun playing now than ever before.
POND
AUS TOUR
JUNE/JULY 2024Friday 14 June 2024 – VIVID Sydney at Carriageworks, Sydney, NSW – with Delivery
Saturday 15 June 2024 – Altar, Hobart, TAS – with 208L Containers
Thursday 27 June 2024 – Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide, SA – with Coldwave
Friday 28 June 2024 – Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, VIC – with Parsnip
Saturday 29 June 2024 – Princess Theatre, Brisbane, QLD – with Full Flower Moon Band
Saturday 6 July 2024 – Freo Social, Fremantle, WA – with Gia ComoTickets on sale at pond.band
“So Lo” by Pond out now
Stung! by Pond out Friday 21 June 2024
Pre-order your copy of Stung! on 180g 2LP “Bee” vinyl here
STUNG!
Track Listing:1. Constant Picnic
2. (I’m) Stung
3. Neon River
4. So Lo
5. Black Lung
6. Sunrise For The Lonely
7. Elf Bar Blues
8. Edge of the World Pt. 3
9. Stars In Silken Sheets
10. Boys Don’t Crash
11. O, UV Ray
12. Last Elvis
13. Elephant Gun
14. Fell From Grace With The SeaPOND
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR
NOV/DEC 2024
(JUST ANNOUNCED!)With special guest Fazerdaze
Tuesday 12 November 2024 – Royale, Boston, MA
Wednesday 13 November 2024 – Brooklyn Steel, Brooklyn, NY
Thursday 14 November 2024 – Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA
Saturday 16 November 2024 – 9:30 Club, Washington, DC
Sunday 17 November 2024 – Mr. Smalls Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA
Tuesday 19 November 2024 – Danforth Music Hall, Toronto, ON
Wednesday 20 November 2024 – St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit, MI
Friday 22 November 2024 – Vic Theatre, Chicago, IL
Saturday 23 November 2024 – First Avenue, Minneapolis, MN
Thursday 28 November 2024 – Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, BC
Friday 29 November 2024 – Neptune Theatre, Seattle, WA
Saturday 30 November 2024 – Revolution Hall, Portland, OR
Tuesday 3 December 2024 – The Warfield, San Francisco, CA
Thursday 5 December 2024 – The Wiltern, Los Angeles, CAUK/EU 2024
With special guest Barbagallo
Tuesday 24 September 2024 | Papillon – Southampton, UK
Thursday, 26 September | Gorilla – Manchester, UK
Friday, 27 September | The Wardrobe – Leeds, UK
Saturday, 28 September | The Grove – Newcastle, UK
Sunday, 29 September | King Tut’s Wah Wah – Glasgow, UK
Tuesday, 1 October | XOYO Birmingham – Birmingham, UK
Wednesday, 2 October | Thekla – Bristol, UK
Thursday, 3 October | Scala – London, UK
Saturday, 5 October | TBD – Paris, FR
Sunday, 6 October | La Grand Salon, Botanique – Brussels, BE
Monday, 7 October | Paradiso – Amsterdam, NL
Tuesday, 8 October | Bürgerhaus Stollwerck – Cologne, DE
Thursday, 10 October | Hole44 – Berlin, DE
Friday, 11 October | Fabrik – Hamburg, DE
Sunday 13 October 2024 | Vega – Copenhagen, DK
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AMNPLIFY – DB
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