Pond have dropped a new single ahead of their Australian shows next month.
“So Lo” is the third taste of their upcoming album, Stung!, and the track is described best by the band themselves.
“I think Gum was just messing around on guitar playing something fun and cheesy and then realised it could be cool in a kind of cold, concrete, No-Wave way,” explains Pond’s Nick Allbrook.
“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.”
“So Lo” follows previous singles “(I’m) Stung” and “Neon River”, all set to feature on the upcoming album Stung!, dropping on Friday, June 21st. It’s out today with an animated facial capture visualiser by Alejandro Crawford, which you can watch below.
Pond’s Australian tour kicks off at Sydney’s Carriageworks on Friday, June 14th, with stops in Hobart, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Fremantle. Support acts include Delivery (Sydney), 208L Containers (Hobart), Coldwave (Adelaide), Parsnip (Melbourne), Full Flower Moon Band (Brisbane), and Gia Como (Fremantle). Tickets are on sale now at pond.band.
The band has a big year ahead, including a North American tour with Fazerdaze in November and a fifteen-date UK/Europe run in September and October.
Stung! will be a double-LP with 14 songs, promising their most expansive music yet. The album first came to life in Jay Watson’s backyard studio before the group moved to a state-of-the-art studio in Dunsborough, a scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast.
Pond’s “So Lo” is out now.
