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Sep 01, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Australian psych-rock band POND are releasing their ninth studio album, fittingly titled 9, on October 1 via Spinning Top/Secretly Distribution. Now they have shared its newest single, “Human Touch,” via a video. The song seems partially to be about disconnecting from screens and reconnecting with in-person human interaction. Duncan Wright directed the video, in which frontman Nick Allbrook perhaps channels a bit of Mick Jagger’s dancing. Godzilla briefly shows up too. Watch it below.

Allbrook had this to say about what inspired the song in a press release: “One time a woman was smashing up a car outside my house, begging me to help her steal it. It was a lovely day. She was wired but sweet in a way. Her dog, Josie, was sitting in the passenger seat being very cute and fluffy. We talked for a good few hours in the sunny cul-de-sac and neither of us ended up committing grand theft auto. The music started with a grimey Casio loop Jay made, that we built the song around.”

Of the video, Allbrook says: “My original idea was to be dancing in the central business district of Perth, being thoroughly ignored by suits on their lunch break. Turns out me and Duncan Wright (Director) are both quivering Fremantle natives and terrified of the City. When Duncan saw a pretty sliver of morning sunlight in the West End we figured, stuff it, let’s do it there. Zero people is kind of the same thing as being ignored by lots of people, right? I need some human connection blah blah blah. It was super fun to make. We didn’t really have a strict plan and I overcame by anxiety about dancing in platform shoes to no music at 9am on a Tuesday morning like a kook.”

Previously the band shared the album’s first single, “Pink Lunettes,” a new song the band shared in April via a video. “Pink Lunettes” was one of our Songs of the Week. When 9 was announced POND shared its second single, “America’s Cup,” which also made our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared its third single, “Toast,” shared via a video. “Toast” was also 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 in a previous press release: “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.”

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