Following the recent release of their ninth studio album 9, today Pond announce a UK and Europe headline tour due to take place in May and June 2022. Following a performance at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival, the Fremantle five piece will take the stage across the UK in June, taking in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and a London show at Electric Ballroom. Tickets are on general sale from 10am on Wednesday 24th November via http://pond.band/. To celebrate, get physical with frontman Nick Allbrook on the official video for ‘Take Me Avalon I’m Young’.
Of the sprawling ‘Take Me Avalon I’m Young’, Allbrook states, “Turns out my medieval history degree is still lingering in the back streets of my mind. The final resting place of Arthur, the mythic isles where we could go for peace and prosperity but which turns out to be an expensive grey grind. A sense of wonder becomes more and more slippery as the years go by. I’m actually really proud of this tune.”
The athletic visual accompaniment was captured in the picturesque seaside town of Hastings and was directed by award-winning filmmaker and creative director Bunny Kinney. “This was, no joke, the most fun video I’ve ever been a part of. I spent two days rushing around Hastings with my dear friend Bunny and the lovely George, Joe and James Beatty, running, swimming, shooting, fencing and playing terrible basketball. It was a dream come true. The freezing sunrise yoga was magical in retrospect, even if I was a brat at the time (sorry Bunny). A perfect seaside weekend; I got to play, and Bunny got to create an ode to his favorite sport, the modern pentathlon. Massive thanks to Lewis and Steph for their patience and kindness as my instructors,” says Allbrook of the clip.
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Featuring the vacillating psych-rock jam ‘Human Touch’, blissed out album track ‘Toast’, the elastic hipped robo-funk single ‘America’s Cup’ and the high energy, no-wave lead track ‘Pink Lunettes’, on 9, Pond recaptures an anarchic sense of uncertainty and fly closer than ever before to the creative supernova that has blazed across so much of the band’s music.
“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,” muses Allbrook on the album.
Produced by Pond and mixed by Jay Watson and James Ireland, on 9, Pond’s explorations are funnelled into electrifying bursts of pure psych – pop joy. No tune even veers past the five minute
mark. Above all though, what you get from 9 is a sense of creative abandon and just plain fun. 9
is available now on all formats as well as multiple colour options in 12” vinyl, CD and cassette via pondband.ffm.to/nine.
