Even voorstellen – Pond – Stung
POND ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM STUNG!, OUT JUNE 21 VIA SPINNING TOP RECORDS

March 24 NEW SINGLE “(I’M) STUNG” POND - (I'm) Stung (Official Video) (youtube.com)

June 24 “so lo” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7-Ij6xqu5k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kph93orZx78 Black lung (sept24)

06/10 La Grand Salon, Botanique - Brussels, BE

Prolific and beloved psychedelic rock band Pond has announced Stung! which will be released June 21, 2024 via Spinning Top Records. The announcement of the Perth band’s tenth album arrives alongside new single “(I’m) Stung,”

“I wrote most of this while mowing someone’s lawn. I went home and put my fingers on the piano and pretty much played the base of it first go. This is a very rare and special treat and buoyed me for weeks. It’s funny because I had a mad crush on someone, and they dropped me like a sack of shit and this song just flew down and clocked me right in the forehead and I felt totally better. Then Gin and Gum added all their magic - cool sounds, passing chords..

It's about being totally pathetically stung by someone and just having to be cool with it being unrequited. Being resilient, accepting that you are a bit of a goose, but life goes on.”

‘(I’m) Stung’ arrives alongside a video shot in Western Australia by Chris Adams. “We went to Lancelin, one of the most stereotypically Western Australian looking places in Western Australia, armed with a super 8 camera, 12 tubes of silver body paint and a rock eisteddfod wardrobe,” Pond say of the visualiser. “Nothing but the blistering heat and dehydration and a battalion of legendary holidaymakers in ATVs stood between us and cinema history. Our friend Chris Adams also put on his little “filmic auteur” cap and carried our shit around while we cavorted among the dunes dressed like a knock off NSYNC. Omg and the bee!! The bee obviously makes it. Nick kind of lost his mind in the endless whiteness and started fearfully battling the beast in the sky. Probably all the paint fumes.

The last four Pond albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity, 10 ideas always tucked into 40 minutes or so. But on Stung!, they gleefully, madly, and willfully lean into double-LP largesse, tapping the spirit of Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times by funneling 14 songs into the most unfettered and splendid hour of their recording career. A band for the better part of two decades, Pond has accepted (with no small joy or relief) that they are no longer beholden to shifting expectations of cool. That idea has empowered them, allowing them to play precisely what they want, to not move toward any goal but being themselves.

It takes more effort for Pond to make a record these days—not musically, of course, but logistically. They’re all adults with relationships, children, professions, hobbies, side-projects, or some mix of them all. (To wit, Allbrook and Jay Watson, or GUM, both released solo albums last year.) They began making Stung! in piecemeal fashion, then, a member or two showing up at the little studio in Watson’s back yard to work on a new idea. They’d tinker joyously and endlessly in Watson’s little workshop, trying a panoply of machines and widgets to get the most interesting sounds. What’s more, they were able to let the songs they had sit over time, so that Pond’s deeply democratic process could not only siphon and improve the best ones but also tease out what they might be missing for this very full double-record.

At last, they realised they ran the risk of being stuck in this phase—creation, adjustment, addition—forever. The whole quintet decamped to Dunsborough, the scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast where a friend had recently finished a spacious and state-of-the-art studio. Allbrook would run near the shore each morning. They’d all swim during the day, then record until deep in the night. They left most of their ancillary gear at home, forcing them to drill down on the songs, ideas, and sounds they already had, to make them better without getting carried away in endless possibility. After all, after nearly a year of writing and workshopping, they had plenty of material, the makings of a set more expansive than any previous Pond album.

The title Stung! began as a joke in Pond, a reference to having a crush on someone or something that they began to use so often they simply had to make it the name. They still laugh when they hear it now, a silly inside wisecrack suddenly open to the outside world. But it’s kind of a credo, too: despite the bruises, the callousness, and the suffering, they remain stung with music, with the idea of making songs that feel just so and doing it together, as friends. And they are stung with the world, too, even when it bites back. “Well, I’m stung/the bells been rung,” Allbrook sings during the winning title track. “If love’s a game, then I guess you won.” Ten albums in, though, Pond seems to be having more fun playing now than ever before.

Following a run of dates in Australia with Queens of the Stone Age this winter and a run of US shows in the spring, Pond’s world tour will arrive in Europe in September. The band will stop in eight UK cities including London, where they headline the distinguished Scala on 3rd October.