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May 19, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Matsu

Australian psych-rock band POND have announced their ninth studio album, fittingly titled 9, and shared a new song from it, “America’s Cup.” 9 is due out October 1 via Spinning Top/Secretly Distribution. “America’s Cup” was shared via a Sam Kristofski-directed video. Watch it below, followed by the album’s cover art and tracklist.

“The beat makes me think of a New York street strut, Sesame Street style,” says POND frontman Nick Allbrook of the new single. “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.”

“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,” says Kristofski of the single’s video. “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.”

The album is confirmed to feature “Pink Lunettes,” a new song the band shared in April via a video. “Pink Lunettes” was one of our Songs of the Week.

POND’s last album was 2019’s Tasmania. POND produced the album, which was mixed by the band’s Jay Watson and James Ireland.

Allbrook also had this to say about the album: “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.”

9 Tracklist:

1. Song for Anges
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

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