Pond have announced the release of their ninth studio album, helpfully called ‘9’, and shared a new single called ‘America’s Cup’.
The record will be the first Pond album not to be produced by Tame Impala‘s Kevin Parker since 2010’s ‘Frond’. Instead the band have self-produced, with bandmates James Ireland and Jay Watson (GUM) mixing.
‘America’s Cup’ follows the new direction of previous single ‘Pink Lunettes’, with a thumping funk bassline and Prince-like glamour. The style is also befitting of the lyrics, which focus on the gentrification of Western Australia and Fremantle after Australia’s 1983 win of the America’s Cup.
“It’s about Fremantle before Alan Bond gave the big ball of gentrification it’s final shove, when it was cheap and harsh and the broken relics of the pre-87 port city were young, groovy cats in a secret idyll wedged between the river and the sea,” Frontman Nicholas Allbrook said in a press release. “It’s also about blokes being different versions of whatever the hell we’ve been taught were supposed to be.”
Watch the twisted music video by Kristofski below, where the winner of that cup auctions it off.
Pond’s ‘9’ will be released on October 1. Allbrook reflected that the theme of the album was “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,” he said.
“Stuff like my cheap Chinese slippers, or a soiled teddy bear, or Agnes Martin… 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.”
‘9’ is the band’s first studio album since 2019’s ‘Tasmania’, a record NME gave four stars upon release describing it as “a timely record, given our current apocalyptic weather conditions”.
The tracklist of Pond’s forthcoming album ‘9’ is:
1. Song For Agnes
2. Human Touch
3. America’s Cup
4. Take Me Avalon I’m Young
5. Pink Lunettes
6. Czech Locomotive
7. Rambo
8. Gold Cup / Plastic Sole
9. Toast