POND Releases New Album Track & Video 'Toast'

Announced to perform at Primavera Sound in 2022 and set to take the screen at Splendour in Grass XR next month, today Pond reveals album song "Toast," alongside a heavenly lyric video. The blissed out track will feature on the Fremantle five-piece's ninth studio album 9, available October 1 via Spinning Top Records.

Lyrically, "Toast" addresses last year's bush fires in Australia and the appalling wealth divide in frontman Nick Allbrook's childhood home in Western Australia. "The intro chords came from a Joe Ryan demo mysteriously titled Toast. I've never asked Joe why he landed on that name, and I probably never will, but it pointed toward the image of fat-headed gobblers touching flutes of bubbles, watching the End of Days gallop over the horizon. I often wonder about those people - the money hoarders, climate change deniers, earth-pilferers and adventure capitalists - are they nihilists or anarchists or do they really believe they are to be saved by some Rock Opera Jesus? We may never know, but here is 'Toast,' which is hopefully as smooth as the smooth, smooth sailing of our glorious leaders fat old white lives," says Allbrook of the track.

Directed and edited by Pond and Alex Haygarth, dine in the sky on the karaoke style clip for "Toast." "We filmed the clip on a green screen in an abandoned garden centre in one continuous take. It cost us $300 to make (the price of four takes worth of champagne). I ate five fried eggs over the course of it. Another instalment in a long series of homemade Pond videos," says Jay Watson of the video.

Featuring new single "America's Cup" and 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 lense 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 for pre-order in digital formats as well as multiple colour options in 12" vinyl, CD and cassette via pondband.ffm.to/nine.

Photo Credit: Matsu

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