Pond are masters of evoking chaotic good and escapism. Since their 2009 debut, Psychedelic Mango, the eccentric group comprising Nick Allbrook, Jay Watson, “Shiny” Joe Ryan, James Ireland, and Jamie Terry find success in being ever-changing – allowing the music they create to guide them to their next destination. Vibrant textures often overlay weighty themes of colonialism, identity, and political discourse in their highly-conceptual string of 11 albums; where they invite audiences to move through them in tandem with the band, finding catharsis and bliss along the way.
Continuing to expand on their combination of neo-psychedalia, synth-pop, and pub-rock makes placing Pond’s latest, Terrestrials, under the “psychedelic-rock” umbrella far too ambiguous. Rooted in their Australian identity, the album targets the impacts of exploitative capitalism and environmental collapse by outlining the contradictions found within their home’s history. Yet underneath these tensions, Terrestrials is supported by belief in human perseverance and connection, allowing a shred of optimism to seep through the catastrophes that it maps.
Opting for a more stripped-back sound than their former records, Terrestrials continues to exemplify the haphazard methods of creation that Pond employs. A Pond album becomes uniquely it’s own sound through submitting to the creative process and letting the journey unfold naturally. Every performance and release over nearly 20 years as a band continues to strengthen their bonds with one another, fuelling even more energy within their theatrical live sets – which front-man Nick Allbrook details.
Your stage presence and demeanour is always highly-regarded and compared to a lot of legacy acts like Mick Jagger and Freddie Mercury. What does it feel like from your perspective to hear those sorts of comparisons?
ALLBROOK: Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to know what to say when people are just glazing you.
100% Do you feel like there’s a pressure or some sense of wondering why it’s always a comparison rather than your own unique thing?
ALLBROOK: I suppose a lot of dance and expression doesn’t exist in isolation, does it? Everything I’ve seen and been moved by in my life does colour the way I do it. Sometimes it’s really weird. I’ll be in the middle of a song, and for some reason, I’ll just think of this VHS my mates used to watch at their shared house. Nick Odell and Andrew Britton used to have this Jesus Lizard live VHS and it just came into my mind a little while ago in the middle of a gig. I felt a bit of that coming to me.
A lot of it’s just totally unconscious and kind of flailing about. But I suppose like Mick Jagger is such a cultural touchstone that it’s as vague as saying, “Psych-rock five-piece Pond,” you know? You’re not really saying anything. It’s just a male singer who moves with some sort of freedom and femininity. I’m not mad at it; Mick Jagger’s amazing.
Terrestrials does an excellent job of pointing out the troubles you observe in Australia and in the grand scheme of the world, but with an essence of hope. How do you approach upholding that sense of hope in your individual lives when things feel bleak?
ALLBROOK: Writing an album and writing lyrics takes a long time. I think if I was totally weighed down with a sort of morbid fatalism that you can get for the whole time, I’d be pretty fucked up. I feel like even the darkest music has hope in it. It’s the fact that it is music and if anyone is still taking the time and effort to sing, or even not sing, but to make art, then that implies a little bit of hope in itself.
What did subjecting your recording process to a simple set of rules for the first time teach you about how you’d like to approach music in the future?
ALLBROOK: It’s an interesting way of doing it. It’s not something I’m gonna necessarily do forever, but it is an interesting experiment. In art making, having a conceptual scaffolding or something to work within – I know a lot of people say having too much choice just makes it impossible to create, it doesn’t really, but it was fun just having this set of rules.
There’s lots of different ways that that happens that lots of people do, like Wendy Carlos making Switched-On Bach. Just like, “We’re gonna make Bach and recreate it with a Moog Prodigy or Modular Synth or whatever. It’s a very strict kind of methodological framework. But then there’s Gareth Liddiard did his whole album in a cabin in the Blue Mountains, or Bon e’sIver doing his shit in a cabin. Having these spatial, conceptual, or gear restrictions – it’s just cool to kind of force yourself into a corner and see how you get out.
One thing it does for us is it actually just excites us; which is fucking important because it gets pretty goddamn boring, just being like, “Let’s make another Pond album.” We’ve actually had these directive north stars that are just fucking stupid and we break them instantly. But it’s just some sort of carrot to dangle in front of everyone to be like, “This is going to be fun and interesting. How are we going to do this?”
Ages ago with our album, The Weather, the idea behind that was that it’s going to be all like MPC sample-based like Kanye, except we’re only going to use old Pond samples. And then we started doing it and were like, “Oh, that’s pretty shit,” so we sampled another song and made a song out of it. I think all up, we did two songs where we sampled and the rest of it was other stuff. That wasn’t the album at all.
Where did you see a difference in inspirational flow when more restrictions were put into place?
ALLBROOK: I think even writing, a pretty concrete example is you write four chords, and some lyrics. And when the restriction is “goths at the pub, no fuzz, no Pink Floyd shit,” then you’re kind of like, “Let’s see how those chords sound translated to a really sharp, chorus-y 12 string guitar played in an arpeggiated pattern up the neck at a quite high BPM.” We’ll get like an 80s drum machine with some reverb on it, and it just gives us somewhere to go with it to try.
We’ve been doing that for the next album, throwing around breakbeats and real heavy Studio One Dub. It just gives you something instead of just having your cowboy chords and going “Well, what do we do with that?” It’s just fun to try to try stuff, and that’s how it works.
Shifting from album logistics, I read this quote in an interview from you: “You miss out on all of life’s beautiful moments and forget that you’re a writer if you’re always staring at your phone. Once you put it down, inspiration is everywhere.” In an era where doom-scrolling and distraction feels addicting, what allows you to feel present, grounded, and fully open to inspiration?
ALLBROOK: It’s hard. I’m an addict as well. There’s no beating around the bush that they’ve made an addictive product to make money. But hanging out with friends and running without my phone, without music. I think just forcing is forcing myself sometimes, when I’m trying to write a song to just get out and concentrate. I guess you do just have to force yourself. Go for a walk and focus in a way that it’s half focusing and half not focusing. It’s just opening the pool a little bit more and being curious.
I do really think locomotion is pretty valuable. Take the bus, leave your phone, go for a drive, ride your bike, go for a walk, go for a run. Don’t try to get it over with as quickly as humanly possible, linger a bit more. Understanding that the benefit you get from that is better than whatever the fuck you think you’re going to achieve in the 20 minutes you’re going to save doing it at warp speed. You’re going to achieve more out there wandering–with both spellings, then you will if you save time and get back to your phone. I reckon.
As you near 20 years into a career as a band, what continues to fuel the excitement of working together? What has been the most fulfilling part of watching both your musical and personal relationships to one another grow?
ALLBROOK: I think having a vague creative destination is cool. It’s good. I don’t know where that comes from – I think we’re just excited about it. You just want to write a better song, or another good one. It’s just some purpose and what we do. It’s not a drag. It’s exciting to try and think about how you’re going to do this and every time you strike another vein of gold, it’s just joy. It’s so wonderful.
The whole process continues because we fucking love hanging out with each other and we’re still mates. We still like to go to the pub together if we weren’t making music together. It’s just even more exciting because you write something, you have an idea, or you hear a song, and you flick it over to the others.
Playing together live is great, and the most rewarding thing is just that we’ve managed to do it for so long. We’ve been happy. We’ve been sad. We’ve been angry – we’re all still really good mates. We’ve made a shitload of music together that’s made a lot of people very happy. That’s pretty fucking rewarding.
Izzy Petraglia is a publicist, writer and photographer based in Toronto. Within her work, she loves to tie in her passion for music, fashion, and pop culture. Follow her on Instagram.