Australian rockers Pond will release their ninth studio album, fittingly titled 9, via Spinning Top Records on October 1. The quintet previewed their upcoming record by dropping the single “Toast” along with a lyric video.
Pond unveiled the tracks “Pink Lunettes” in March and “America’s Cup” in May. Both songs will appear on 9. The nine-track LP is the band’s follow-up to Tasmania which came out in March of 2019.
9 was produced by Pond with the band’s Jay Watson and James Ireland handling mixing duties. Watson and Ireland are joined in Pond’s current lineup by Nick Allbrook, Joe Ryan and Jamie Terry. Allbrook shared the following about 9:
“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 lense for viewing our past.”
“Toast” features lyrics in reference to the bush fires that wreaked havoc in Australia last year as well as the income inequality in Western Australia, where Allbrook grew up. “The intro chords came from a Joe Ryan demo mysteriously titled Toast. I’ve never asked Joe why he landed on that name, and I probably never will, but it pointed toward the image of fat-headed gobblers touching flutes of bubbles, watching the End of Days gallop over the horizon,” Nick Allbrook added. “I often wonder about those people – the money hoarders, climate change deniers, earth-pilferers and adventure capitalists – are they nihilists or anarchists or do they really believe they are to be saved by some Rock Opera Jesus? We may never know, but here is ‘Toast,’ which is hopefully as smooth as the smooth, smooth sailing of our glorious leaders fat old white lives.”
Watch Pond’s “Toast” video below:
9 Tracklist
- Song for Agnes
- Human Touch
- America’s Cup
- Take Me Avalon I’m Young
- Pink Lunettes
- Czech Locomotive
- Rambo
- Gold Cup / Plastic Sole
- Toast
