Pond - Immersed in a psychedelic pond

Perth, south-western Australia. A magical and captivating place, caught between a past lost in the memories of Aboriginal dreamtime and a future embodied by a thoroughly modern metropolis, grown out of the early English colonies. Far removed from Australia's other major hubs - Sydney and Canberra to the east, Adelaide to the south, Darwin to the north - Perth conveys a mixed sense of isolation and globalization at once: it's home to more than two million people, yet it sits beside the vast cluster of deserts covering much of the continent, and looks out onto the boundless Indian Ocean - you could head west and encounter almost nothing until reaching Madagascar, and Africa. This is the magical place where, in the mid-2000s, a group of young musicians in love with old-school rock, all barely out of their teens, started making music together. The essential names: Kevin Parker, Nick Allbrook, Jay Watson, "Shiny" Joe Ryan, Cam Avery. Young enthusiasts of the six-string and classic rock, especially the psychedelic and acid sounds of the 60s and 70s, who soon became multi-instrumentalists and began collaborating in loose jam sessions, playing the city's venues and spawning shapeshifting projects whose members were essentially interchangeable. The only goal: the music.

Two of these projects would coalesce into a couple of the biggest names in 2010s music, names that have left their mark on the history of Australian rock and on neo-psychedelia worldwide. Tame Impala and Pond. Two bands that, early on, flowed into one another, trading ideas, influences and members, and developing a shared sound that can also be heard in the members' individual solo output. Then, over the years, Tame Impala essentially became a solo, personal project for Kevin Parker alone (except on stage), while Pond remained a band led chiefly by Nick Allbrook, also its official frontman, and Jay Watson. Either way, at least in the early years, it's impossible to talk about one band without talking about the other.

Lysergic medley

The first of the two projects to take definite shape was Tame Impala, to which Watson contributed from as early as 2007, including on "The Sun", one of the very first songs written by Parker and released on the band's first EP, which came out back in September 2008. That's also the year Pond became active, while their debut work, already a full LP, arrived in early 2009 under the telling title Psychedelic Mango - a title that says it all.

At this point, right at the start, Pond consisted only of Allbrook, Ryan and Watson, the three members who would remain constant throughout the band's history. The record was cut in thoroughly amateur fashion on an 8-track at Allbrook's parents' house, the old-fashioned way, and only 500 copies were pressed. Today it's very hard to track down and can only be heard on Apple Music. The album is driven by 60s-style psychedelic electric guitars, which at times drift into acid jams recalling the Grateful Dead or Arthur Lee's Love, as on the opening "That Is How We Came"; other songs instead recall something you might find on Lenny Kaye's famous Nuggets compilation, as on "Paisley Adams"; and others still echo the sound of British Invasion bands, as on "Mick Manmoose". Finally there are some prominent hard-prog influences (particularly on "Gringolet's Drunken Baggage").

As the purpose-made cover art also suggests, the album as a whole sounds like something that could have been recorded between 1967 and 1970. The sound quality is amateurish, often deliberately lo-fi and plainly naive and experimental (at the time of recording Allbrook was 21, Ryan was 21 and Watson was 19), but the compositional and melodic instincts, however tentative, can already be glimpsed here and there, seasoned with wah-wah scattered pretty much everywhere and very Beatles-esque vocal harmonies. Still, it's all diluted in a disorganized lysergic swirl, not lacking in a certain streak of irony (also audible in the goofy little vocal bits Allbrook drops in here and there, which would go on to become his trademark) and a very youthful sonic recklessness - which, in any case, leaves no room on this first album for a defined sound aiming at anything more than a naive, unpretentious and unambitious musical release of energy.

Free-form acid

In 2009 both Allbrook and Watson became members of Kevin Parker's live band, who had by then already released two EPs and the single "Sundown Syndrome". Amid the general mayhem, Parker in turn became Pond's drummer for a brief spell, between 2009 and 2011, while for his part Allbrook would play bass and guitar for him until 2013 and Watson would be his drummer, as well as backing vocalist, until 2012 (before switching to keyboards, a role he still holds today). The members of the two bands were therefore playing in close contact with each other throughout the late 2000s, launching their careers together, learning their instruments on the job and cutting their teeth through improvisation and jam sessions.

The sound of Pond's second album, Corridors Of Blissterday, is the result of all this, and compared to the first album it comes across as even more elusive, if anything: just six tracks, most of them fairly long, delivering psychedelic rock sounds that get lost in themselves. The lysergic streak is more pronounced and spacious, and rather than the Grateful Dead what comes to mind is Iron Butterfly or the early Pink Floyd of Syd Barrett. The latter's influence is felt especially on "Caterpillar Mansion", a song driven by an obsessive riff and decorated with hallucinated sounds and noises that could easily sit on "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn"; and on the feverish "Mist In My Brainforest".

On this record Pond's influences push past 1970 and brush up against the growing experimentalism of early prog, giving themselves over to longer, noisier, more abstract compositions. Looking back on this period some years later, in 2012, Watson would recall: "We were just a free-form thing, an acid-rock jam band. We didn't really have songs or anything, I think everyone thought we were just drugged-out idiots." The record is also said to have been cut "in a frenzy" over five days "at some point in 2009, nobody seems to remember exactly when." The whole idea really was to channel the golden days of psychedelia, when Lsd tabs were dissolved in tea and weed could be found in every recording studio. Still, a few flashes of "clarity" surface here and there: "Sweet Loretta" shows off a regular verse-chorus structure, even if still dressed up in loose, undefined improvisation. The album closes with the hard-prog of "Lightning Hip" and the tense crescendo of "Ascending", heavily atmospheric and ending in an explosive finale.

The new psychedelia

In 2010 Jamie Terry joined the lineup as the fourth official member, mainly on keyboards, and in September of that same year Pond released their third album, Frond. The leap from its predecessors is considerable: the 60s and 70s psychedelic influences are all still there, and the sound remains largely guitar-driven, but a clear shift toward a more polished, composed and organized style starts to come through. The record came out the same year as Tame Impala's debut album, and setting the two works side by side, the resemblance is obvious. On this third Pond LP, the songs are shorter, less given over to jam sessions (in fact, improvisation is almost entirely absent) and show much greater care put into arrangement, vocal harmonies and the building of an acid-psych wall of sound that defines a solid, mature and even ambitious sound. "Cloud City" is a clear example of this, also released as a single and a bona fide classic in the band's history.

To give an idea of the other nooks and crannies explored on the album: “Torn Asunder” sounds like something that could sit on the Rolling Stones' “Their Satanic Majesties Request”, while “Duck And Clover” recalls the style of contemporaries Black Angels, another neo-psychedelic band on the rise at the time. “Sunlight Cardigan” is a delicate lysergic poem that sounds very 1967 and is the first Pond song in which Jay Watson takes on a prominent role, including as vocalist (normally, and especially up to that point, Allbrook is always the one singing). Despite its nostalgic character, the track pushes hard toward building a new, modern psychedelic sound, and reveals the real abilities of a band that until a few months earlier had seemed like little more than a particularly inspired jam band. This latter approach survives only on the brief “The Place Behind The Duck”, while “Mother Nigeria” also gives Joe Ryan his own little spotlight, being one of the few band songs where he takes lead vocals.

The record closes in grand style with the delicate, almost moving title track, a crescendo driven by a sweet piano melody that contrasts with an acid wall solemnly erected by the musicians, before resolving into sudden silence. Almost a statement of intent, even in relation to the rest of this tracklist: we're ready to get serious.

Beard, Wives And Denim

The fourth Pond album, Beard, Wives And Denim, continues to work through a renewed, modern take on psychedelia, still closely tied to the 60s and 70s and to guitars as the primary focus, but also increasingly linked to a fresher, poppier, more accessible vision of the song form. The record is very rock but also very catchy, making it appealing to fans of the genre and its more classic forms, those who favour its strictly hard-psych traits. A song like “Fantastic Explosion Of Time”, which opens the tracklist, already sets the whole mood of the Pond's output from this period: a literally explosive, euphoric track, eager to update that naive festival-rock'n'roll joy, while still showing a certain compositional finesse. Songs like “Moth Wings”, another high point of the record, and “You Broke My Cool” are very similar.

From this point of view, this album is perhaps the one in Pond's catalogue that can most strictly be defined as psychedelic rock, understood as a recent-era revival of the genre but with an ethic (and an aesthetic) very much tied to those of decades past, without giving up, however, that certain ironic streak typical of Pond, which surfaces both in the vocals (especially the raucous Allbrook's) and in the arrangements and harmonies, as well as in the artwork and the titles themselves (this record being a good example).

A substantial difference is also starting to take shape, one clearly recognisable by ear, between Allbrook's compositional style and Watson's — the band's own “Lennon/McCartney” pair: the former leans toward a dreamlike, abstract, somewhat freaky style of writing that always leaves room for improvisation and digression, often favouring ballads, lo-fi or distorted guitars and plenty of echo; the latter quickly establishes himself as a perfectionist of composition and production, aspiring to ambitious arrangements and clean verses and placing great importance on the melodic component — helped, perhaps, by his role in Tame Impala and his closeness to Kevin Parker, who, incidentally, appears on the album for the first time as producer, and at this stage also as drummer (under the pseudonym Kaykay Sorbet). Parker would go on to produce the next four Pond albums, remaining “in charge” of that role until 2019.

Hobo Rocket

With Hobo Rocket, their fifth album, Pond seem to take a decisive step backwards, or rather sideways, in their journey toward building a new 2010s psychedelia. The record leans more toward 60s sounds than 70s ones, exploring a hypothetical earlier chapter than the one found on their first releases, and essentially giving itself over to a heavy-psych sound reminiscent of bands like Iron Butterfly and Captain Beyond. Another record out of time, one that revisits the free-form experiments of a few years earlier but this time presents them with a more mature attitude and in less diluted, more concrete compositions. Distorted, decisive, electric guitar riffs therefore take on great importance on this album, only occasionally giving way to hazy improvisations and vague echo effects. It all resolves into a wall of sound that finds Pond searching for their own dimension, still undefined, somewhere between jam band, nostalgic outfit and modern alt-rock group.

The result comes across well on songs like “Xanman” and “Giant Tortoise” — the latter a fan favourite — which burst into a thousand compressed colours. “O Dharma” is a strongly atmospheric, dreamlike track, deliberately contrasting with the rest of the tracklist, presenting more folk-leaning traits and recalling the hippie flashes of Donovan and, once again, the Stones' experiments on “Their Satanic Majesties Request”. The title track, “Hobo Rocket”, sounds as if it were recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, recalling several Velvet Underground songs, with a sung narration very much in the style of Lou Reed and a few sitar notes laid over an extended noise-induced haze.

Taken as a whole, this fifth album acts for Pond as a kind of pause, a moment of recovery that reflects a certain fear of moving toward new sounds, a retreat into a comfort zone already explored in every corner and that, deep down, is starting to feel too small. After all, we're still in 2013, and many rock bands schooled in the classic sounds of the 60s and 70s are too in love with guitars and riffs and reluctant to fully embrace new technologies, synths and digital production, even if only semi-ironically. But, as would soon become clear, for Pond this moment of withdrawal would turn out to be a kind of run-up before the great leap straight into that new world of unheard-of, shimmering, futuristic music.

Back In Space Again

By the middle of the 2010s, Pond's success and critical standing were such that all the members decided, each at their own pace, to pursue solo careers. Obviously, their individual efforts can hardly be compared to the success of the band or of Tame Impala, with the possible exception of GUM, aka Jay Watson, who made his solo debut in 2014 with the album “Delorean Highway”. Also in 2014, Nick Allbrook released his first record under his own name, titled “Ganough, Wallis And Fatun”, and that same year also saw the arrival of “The Cosmic Microwave Background”, the first official work by “Shiny” Joe Ryan. Their output clearly has all the qualities of solo outlets, aiming for nothing more than to mark out the boundaries of a free space for exploration outside the band, while meanwhile the band's ongoing activity ensures a now-steady stream of success (and income).

With Man It Feels Like Space Again, from 2015, comes the real leap in quality. Parker is still on production duties, and that same year he also releases “Currents”, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 2010s. His influence, once again, is clearly felt: under Parker's direction, Pond, in parallel with Tame Impala, adopt a more “plastic” approach to arranging songs and recording the instrumental parts. For the first time, guitars start taking a back seat, while keyboards and synthesizers move to the front, working with the help of a tighter, more organised and regular rhythm section to pack each track into small, shiny, colourful boxes — “packages”, so to speak, that create order out of disorder.

While “Waiting Around For Grace”, the opening track, is still an exalted, riff-driven rock song with energetic atmospheres, things change with “Elvis' Flaming Star”, a lysergic, acidic piece driven by powerful basslines and distorted yet elusive guitar riffs, set in a dreamlike atmosphere. “Zond” and “Outside Is The Right Side” pick up the band's more jam-oriented streak, though tempered by numerous digital production touches that, while often amounting to little more than vocal tweaks or brief decorative glitches, also signal, even if only marginally, the adoption of a whole new approach.

But the real gem of the record is “Sitting Up On Our Crane”: a psychedelic composition by Jay Watson recounting a fear of heights, and of the time when, as a child, he used to climb with friends to the top of tall, abandoned buildings, then look down, terrified of dying. An intense, metaphorical track that alternates a hushed, evocative verse with a spectacular refrain that explodes into a triumph of perfectly mid-2010s synths, with booming basslines, as if deliberately denying the band's rock roots and declaring the start of a new course. The track also comes with a long coda of falsetto vocals floating over pure psychedelic material — a mix of keyboards, synths, bass and guitars — and a highly erudite nod to Dennis Wilson, the legendary Beach Boys drummer, a hugely underrated artist who drowned in 1983.

That's not all, because the sixth Pond album closes with a tasty three-part suite, namely the title track, which provides the perfect conclusion to an innovative tracklist, an eight-minute ride blending psychedelia and progressive rock that could easily have come off a King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard record. With this work, Pond can rightfully be called the quintessential interpreters of neo-psychedelia, that 2010s variant of the genre which, starting from 60s and 70s nostalgia, quickly folds in a certain indie sensibility, an obsessive attention to production polish, a guilty-pleasure taste for digital flourishes, synths, danceable rhythms and new studio technologies, plus an intense interest in building sounds that are new, fresh, complex and wonderfully colourful.

Paint Me Silver

The Weather, from 2017, pushes this trajectory even further. The album's production style becomes openly plastic, relegating guitars to decorative elements and building perfectly polished compositions with distinctly pop contours, giving melodies a more-than-prominent role and leaning heavily on computers and software to create digital, futuristic psychedelic effects that owe far less to the 60s and 70s than to synth-pop and 80s new wave. After all, we're in an era when countless artists, mainstream and otherwise, are mining the aesthetics and musicality of that decade to build something new out of something old, and Pond are, in their own way, no exception. The record is once again (co-)produced by Kevin Parker and recorded partly in the musician's customised home studio in Fremantle, the same place where "Currents" was recorded: once again, the influence is heard loud and clear, from start to finish.

The album opens grandly with the apocalyptic "30000 Megatons," a title referring to the total detonation power of the entire world's nuclear arsenal. In 2017 it's early days to talk about the end of the world in the sense we know it today, but Allbrook's voice, cynical over a bed of abstract synth arpeggios, has no doubts: "30000 megatoni è proprio quel che meritiamo", almost coming to wish for the extinction of the human race, flaws and all. It remains one of the band's most pointed political statements (not the last, as we'll see) and immediately announces a tracklist full of ideas and ambition.

Another highlight of the album, coming right after, is "Sweep Me Off My Feet": introduced by a forceful synth bass, it unfolds into a lucid, twisted psychedelic poem that perfectly exemplifies the clean style the band was pursuing at this stage. The same can be heard in "Paint Me Silver," still one of Pond's most successful songs, and "Colder Than Ice," the only track with Watson on lead vocals. A perfect closer is entrusted to the title track, which seems to echo the iconic, sun-drenched cover art (depicting central Perth): a subtle, hazy, rarefied psychedelia that seems to conjure dreamlike worlds with the tasteful, unobtrusive use of a wah-wah pedal.

According to Allbrook, the album as a whole is a concept piece about the contradictions experienced by those living in Perth, on the edges of Western civilisation, poised somewhere between modernity and antiquity, between urban reality and a (still, for now) unspoiled natural world. And it's clear, from the record's sound, which way the scales are tipping.

Burnt-Out Star

The eighth album, Tasmania, came out in 2019 and reiterates the themes tackled on its predecessor, while seeking a sonic balance that, on one hand, preserves and even pushes further the synth experiments of 2015 and 2017, and on the other recovers a more "organic" and abstract psychedelic dimension, abandoning the pop song format and partially reclaiming the rarefied style of the early albums — though still considerably removed from the wild acid digressions of the late 2000s, by now fully left behind. Case in point is the ambitious "Burnt Out Star," a top-tier slice of space rock that recalls the multi-part dream of "Man It Feels Like Space Again" (the song) and proves that even with keyboards and computers, Pond can still sound like a jam band. The tone shifts completely with "Hand Mouth Dancer" and "The Boys Are Killing Me," songs that reflect on shifting ideas around relationships, masculinity and the male role in society — themes handled with lightness and irony, but set to nostalgic, artificial synth sounds with a clearly melancholic character.

The lament of "Shame" pushes even further in this direction, a reflection on patriarchy's unpaid debts that showcases one of the deepest, most sincere outpourings ever entrusted to Allbrook's voice. In a time of clear environmental crisis comes "Tasmania," a song dedicated to the island of the same name south of Australia, held up as an example of the kind of earthly environmental miracle to be preserved at all costs, against every human idiocy.

In terms of subject matter, the record bears the traces of the most recent shifts in thought and culture at the end of the 2010s, from the #MeToo movement to climate change, without giving up the subtle psychedelic thread running along the edges of every song, softening them and blurring their outlines, while at the same time adopting a sound that's gentler and less intrusive than on the previous record, letting a certain maturity seep into the songwriting — one that goes hand in hand with a career that, by 2019, had already spanned a decade for the Australian band.

A Dreamlike Toast

Then in 2021 came 9, an album whose title plainly flags its status as the group's ninth record, offering something of a summary of Pond's recent sonic adventures. Allbrook admits that various improvisations with a more uptempo rhythmic approach were used in the early writing stages for the new record, though the final result barely shows it, if at all. Indeed, the more digital strain of neo-psychedelia survives, both in deliberately gimmicky form, as on "Pink Lunettes," a clear synth self-parody that seems to poke fun at a whole generation's 80s obsessions, and in more substantial form on "Human Touch," a song shaped by the isolation of the pandemic period that reflects, with euphoric energy, on the importance of touch between two people, however minimal.

The song that stands out most is undoubtedly the closer, "Toast," which sketches a delicate, hazy psychedelia carried by a subtle, driving guitar riff — a perfect summation of all the songwriting progress the band has made over thirteen years of career: the days of acid jams and naïve early noise experiments now feel light years away, because Pond can, to all intents and purposes, be considered a "pop" (rock?) band that emerged from a primordial lysergic soup in the remote lands of Australia, becoming the voice of an entirely new take on an old genre, and at the same time the standard-bearer for a genre that's completely new.

Meanwhile, the band's success has continued: two live albums were released in 2019 and 2021, and all the members keep putting out solo material to great acclaim, especially Jay Watson, who as GUM stands out as one of the most interesting figures in 2020s pop/neo-psychedelia alongside, naturally, Tame Impala and Pond themselves. The group continues to be faithfully followed by a devoted fanbase — not numbering in the millions, perhaps, but one that clearly understands, knows and listens closely to their heroes' music in all its facets, beyond the band's dual soul, the ironic and the earnest, appreciating at once their musicianship, their undeniable growth, and the fundamentally still-intact nature of an independent, alternative project, free from major market logic and proudly operating on the fringes of the mainstream.

Having reached their tenth album, Stung! (2024), Pond once again turn to the rock sounds of their early career, though not so much toward the free-form psychedelic jams or freak experiments of the late 60s, but this time with a precise point of reference: Led Zeppelin. The sound of the legendary English band surfaces repeatedly in the use of 70s hard-rock guitar riffs tilted toward a certain groovy musicality, as heard in "So Lo," the lead single and by far the album's most successful song, which recalls Zeppelin's funkiest period, on a par with "Houses Of The Holy" and "Physical Graffiti".

The British quartet's more classic side instead emerges on another single, "Neon River", built around a guitar part that couldn't be more traditionally rock. Zeppelin clearly return too on the semi-title track, "(I'm) Stung", and on "Boys Don't Crash", all excellent tracks that mark a move away by Pond both from their previous, more dreamy and oneiric episodes and from the retro-synth drift of the late 2010s/early 2020s; the exception here is "Elephant Gun", the one plasticky pseudo-pop song that seems to clash with the sound of the rest of the album.

There's no shortage of ideas that go beyond the simple exercise of revisiting a certain strand of classic rock – a move which, whether driven by nostalgia or not, in 2024 fits in with a broader trend across mainstream music toward a return of "authentic" acoustic and instrumental sounds, in contrast to the digital and electronic production that had also contaminated much of the indie and rock scene, Pond included, in the second half of the 2010s.

On Stung!” the starting point is a personal experience lived by Allbrook himself – a bitter heartbreak that left him "stung", like by a bee (which we see on the cover) – used to build an album with a personal, intimate character, less unhinged and more reflective than the Perth band's past work. It's a formula that yields plenty of lovely surprises, like "Edge Of The World Pt. 3" (parts 1 and 2 are on "The Weather", 2017), a prog-like suite divided into several sections that explores various influences in broad, and here genuinely psychedelic and lysergic, strokes, continuing in the process a tradition of "long", epic songs that Pond have been carrying forward for years, with tracks like "Man It Feels Like Space Again" (2015) or "Burnt Out Star" (2019). Also excellent is the delicate atmosphere of the opening number, "Constant Picnic", and the intense closing ballad "Fell From Grace With The Sea", while the interludes "Elf Bar Blues" and "Stars In Silken Sheets" are a bit of a distraction and slightly muddy the waters, even if, taken as a whole, they work well as small experimental divertissements. One last standout song worth mentioning is certainly "Black Lung", a colourful, heavily instrumental slab of hard rock.

In conclusion, this time Pond give their audience a mature, carefully thought-out album, solid and very well composed, with an unprecedented attention to guitar sounds and a clear will to leave behind the plasticky traits of their most recent output. A record to play for anyone who, even in 2024, still doubts the stature of the Australian band.

Terrestrials (2026) confirms the trend, although this time, according to the band themselves, the influences should be those of fellow countrymen Church and Midnight Oil, with an eye on the post-punk and new wave Australian scene of the early 1980s.

The influence of Midnight Oil – a band criminally underrated even today – comes through clearly: just listen to the first single, "Two Hands", an enthusiastic, truly old-school rock track; or "Roebuck Plains", with jangle arpeggios that take us firmly back to a certain strand of 80s post-punk – perhaps closer to Teardrop Explodes or Dream Syndicate. "The Fatal Shore" is very different from the rest of the album, a dance-rock number with subtly electronic rhythms; there's a reason for that - the track's producer and co-writer is none other than Tame Impala, making a guest appearance.

But despite the post-punk aspirations, the album's basic foundation remains lively, guitar-driven psychedelic rock, as shown by the opening track "Skyworks" and by "Casuarina", which seem to harken back to a specific era of Pond – that of "Man It Feels Like Space Again" (2015). The same goes for "Terrestrials", the fantastic (in every sense) title track, which channels an enthusiasm for purely instrumental, incisive rock, here too leaning toward prog, forgetting any so-called "commercial" impulse. And it's the most quintessentially Pond sound there is, unstoppable frontman Nick Allbrook's yelps included.

Certainly, another highly successful Pond album, a work in which the five Australian musicians once again show the full solidity of a style that has grown thicker and more seasoned over nearly two decades of evolution. An album that's certainly "rock" in more than one sense of the word, but convincing above all in its refusal to make compromises – not that they need to anymore, at this point – and in offering ideas that are quite hard to come by in most of today's psych (or even post-punk) output.

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