American psych-rock outfit POND have announced their next album: 9 is out October 1 via Spinning Top/Secretly Distribution. They’ve also shared a new single from it, ‘America’s Cup’, which arrives with an accompanying video directed by longtime collaborator Sam Kristofski. Check it out below and scroll down for the album’s cover artwork and tracklist.
“The beat makes me think of a New York street strut, Sesame Street style,” POND frontman Nick Allbrook said of the new single in a statement. “But it’s about Fremantle before Alan Bond gave the big ball of gentrification it’s final shove, when it was cheap and harsh and the broken relics of the pre-87 port city were young, groovy cats in a secret idyll wedged between the river and the sea. It’s also about blokes being different versions of whatever the hell we’ve been taught we’re supposed to be.”
Of the video, Kristofski added: “I’m from NZ and the big Sail race was here, the whole country was glued to their TV’s and I don’t even wanna know how much they spent on that thing. So I thought it would be funny if the captain of the racing team won the cup and auctioned it off to a bunch of people who love that kinda thing. Then he celebrates by dancing. Pretty twisted idea but i think it works.”
Talking about the new album, Allbrook had this to say:
We sort of 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. 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.
Back in April, POND returned with the single ‘Pink Lunettes’. Their last album was 2019’s Tasmania.
Pond Cover Artwork:
Pond Tracklist:
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
