Matt Pond and Anya Marina’s careers as songwriters have taken a similar trajectory, with both taking off in the late-2000s with the help of song placement in era-defining teen dramas—the former in The O.C., the latter in the second Twilight installment. Since then, they’ve connected both as romantic partners and, later, as collaborators, with the married couple’s first full-length collection of songs together planned for 2026. “Telepathy” presumably served as the yet-untitled project’s first single last month, and today we get another teaser in the form of “Are You Talking to Me.”
To hear Pond tell it, the new single is a bit of a rose-tinted nostalgia trip as he—harmonizing with Marina—looks back on his early days in NYC. “My first apartment in New York was meant to be a fresh start—a chance to breathe in the chaos and energy of the city,” he recalls. “My roommate Miriam and I would play records deep into the night, singing at the top of our lungs, and driving our other roommate mad. We always seemed to end up on ‘Kiss You All Over’ by Exile, shouting every word like it was a promise. But as the music faded, I often felt a quiet distance between us—like she saw my life as something smaller, something less.”
While the sadness of that moment permeates “Are You Talking to Me,” it’s in constant conversation with nostalgia’s tendency to make any distant memories feel desirable, as well as maturity’s ability to help us “turn sorrow into celebration,” as Pond puts it. “Years later, the bones of ‘Are You Talking to Me’ struck a similar chord with my wife, and we decided to finish it together. We both know what it’s like to take a strange left turn in life—to feel unanchored, to live half out of a suitcase, never fully settled. And yet, there’s something worth celebrating in that uncertainty—the wildness of it, the resilience it demands, the way it keeps you reaching for meaning even when you’re a little lost.”
The upbeat indie-pop tune arrives with a music video directed by Scott Coffey that sees the couple tethered together in various settings. Check it out below, and stream the track here. You can also find dates for Matt Pond PA’s November Several Arrows Later 20th anniversary tour—featuring Marina as opener, along with the promise of collaborative performances later in the evening—here.
