You may be able to tell by the concision of their band name that Pond was an eccentric Australian psych-rock outfit with a stage-filling lineup several years before that niche became marketable. Nearly 20 years into their career together, and now 11 albums deep, they’ve managed to remain at the forefront of the Aussie psych movement while maintaining a sense of modesty—they’re prolific, but not King Gizzard prolific; they helped shape Kevin Parker’s musical origin story without that necessarily being a major part of their legacy 15 years since he left the band to infiltrate the global pop arena as Tame Impala.
For their new album Terrestrials, the band led by Nicholas Allbrook pursued something of a conceptual approach in both sound and lyrics. An aversion to “Pink Floyd shit” was the initial general idea, and as Allbrook points out, the resulting 10 songs remain mostly true to their “goths at the pub” mood board. Lyrically, these songs focus on Australia’s history of tragedies in the name of nationalism and the rational anger its citizens very much should be feeling in response to its patriotic displays—as Allbrook puts it, it’s a record full of “[u]nthinkable natural beauty and shocking violence, incredible creativity and kindness and some of the most filthy fuckwits your imagination could conjure.”
With the record out today via their newly launched Secretly Canadian imprint Mangovision, Allbrook went deep on the inspirations behind each song—from the Bosch-like imagery of Australia Day to tuning into MasterChef or Ice Road Truckers or “something equally shit” while on the road. Check it out and stream the record below.
1. “Skyworks”
The skyworks happen every year on the day Australia was invaded and claimed by the crown. They explode over the river in a gaudy display of drunkenness and patriotism, sponsored by the Lotto. We love a flutter. The river is bejewelled with magical glittering lights, and loud bangs that remind some of cannons and muskets. The river is ablaze, magic, filthy—like a Hieronymus Bosch picture, strewn with bottles and shit in the morning. It’s a confusing time for a confused people. Joe Ryan wrote the main chord progression for this one and then it grew in weird ways.
2. “Casuarina”
This song was one of the first for the album. Gum [Jay Watson] wrote all the music, I reckon, with maybe contributions from Gin [James Ireland]? It’s hard to tell at this point. Casuarina is a native tree sometimes called the Sheoak. It has great cultural significance for Nyoongar people. With a staggering talent for cruelty and psychological torture, it’s also the name of a juvenile prison where young people (disproportionately Indigenous) are kept in inhumane conditions. I wrote this song after Cleveland Dodd committed suicide in this prison.
3. “Through the Heather”
When we were on tour in Europe, Gin kept entertaining himself in the bus by making little ditties on Ableton, whipping up a few a day until some stood out. Then him and Gum worked on it more in a hotel room while watching Ice Road Truckers or something equally shit. Sometimes rock and roll is a glamorous game baby, but mainly it isn’t. Funny that such a beautiful, melancholic, searching song was born surrounded by chip packets and track pants in a van full of filthy pigs. We had so much fun making the spring reverb thunderclaps, giving the spring a cheeky little pinch to make it go boom, looking out over the Indian Ocean from our porch/studio in Seabird while MasterChef played silently in the corner. Let that be a lesson to all you young rockers, OK? Can’t get too inspiring, ya know. Gotta keep a lid on it. Chucking on the telly or making a samwich or having a nap should do it.
4. “Two Hands”
Yes, I was thinking about the movie Two Hands when I called this song “Two Hands.” Damn, our Heath was talented and beautiful… I was also thinking about the chorus of this song, where I say “And our two hands can make a fist.” It’s about a fantasy that the Rio Tinto execs—who demolished Juukan Gorge only to say, “Whoops, soz!”—would be subject to the same type of punishment as a poor person if they had blown up, say, St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s an ode to anger. Sometimes anger is rational, no matter how much blokes will tell you to stop being hysterical. How good is the riff? Another Gum cracker. The chord progression in the bridge was something Joe [Ryan] kept playing at soundcheck that sounded goth as fuck. I’m not sure he knew it, but that probably started the “goths at the pub” motto of the album.
5. “Roebuck Plains”
I wrote this while, would you believe it, driving across the Roebuck Plains just after a big rain. In the Kimberley, in the wet, it looks like everything’s shimmering, quaking with life—like there’s so much contained potential just waiting to burst forth like a shaken up can of Coke. Same goes with a lot of the rest of the album; it’s full of beauty and horror, shock and awe. Unthinkable natural beauty and shocking violence, incredible creativity and kindness and some of the most filthy fuckwits your imagination could conjure. Rob Seaton was a man who walked up and down Stirling Highway all day every day. As teenagers, we used to make fun of him. Many years later a retrospective exhibition showed that he was a prolific, hyper-talented visual artist and a gifted mathematician. A real genius. The world is full of eccentric people with hidden lives, and some of the most out-there find themselves on the Roebuck Plains.
6. “The Fatal Shore”
I feel like I’ve seen this book a squillion times and never ever read it. We made this when Kevin [Parker] asked if he could produce a track for this album. He came in with a drum machine and a bunch of samples and we started stuffing around. I think some of the lyrics were taken from Charmian Clift’s unfinished novel The End of Morning.
7. “Tourmaline”
This is another Gin one, maybe another back-of-the-tour-van 10-minute demo. We did it live and really minimal to tape, and I was so blown away by how good drums, bass, and a guitar playing single notes could sound on playback. I think a lot of the lyrics for this are actually taken from Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, another Randolph Stowe book. His writing is crazy to read for me, because it’s rare to read something that reflects your own life with such color and feeling—the sand, the salt, the boredom, the ocean, the stupid games. My grandma gave me this book when I was very young but I didn’t read it until a few years ago, and I realized then that it was her way of trying to explain why our family is the way it is. That life in Western Australia during the war was very hard, and the young men like my grandfather who came back from there were never the same again. Bored of life and tired of violence. It was like hearing a confession from beyond the grave.
8. “Terrestrials”
This is a Gum one! Alternative tuning and not 4/4—fucking calm down, Watson! This one’s kind of about transcendence, or people being not satisfied with their life and their soil and their home. We wanna be big, we want to fly or escape death, and that desire is killing us.
9. “Personal Hell”
I used to work as a gardener, and we had this one client who was so annoying—super demanding, callous, incredibly wealthy, self-centred, classist—just so easy to dislike. And then one day they heard their gardeners saying all these things and burst into tears, bemoaning their loneliness, their clinginess, the lack of direction or meaning in life. I guess that’s when I realized that even the biggest fuckwit is going through their own shit. Maybe the person tailgating you isn’t just a giant prick in a Ford Raptor, maybe they’re a giant prick in a Ford Raptor racing to the maternity ward. It’s also about the Black Summer bushfires. The badass riff in the middle is a Gum one that makes my whiskers tremble every damn time. We recorded it in Mullumbimby before and after jumping in a majestic jungle creek and narrowly avoiding leeches (we think).
10. “Nashville (I’m Dying)”
My neighbor, bless his heart, is an ideas man. One of his ideas was that I should write a song about Nashville, because, much like Christmas songs, there’s always people who want to listen to a song about Nashville! For a second I thought, “Yeah, nice one mate,” and went inside. But I couldn’t forget about the idea, and started writing lyrics that probably weren’t quite as universal as he’d imagined, but still. The original song I wrote sounded like a very cheesy Springsteen bar ballad, but I managed to twist it to not be garbage and pass the committee. My neighbor actually submitted his own lyrics the next day, slipped under my front door. I didn’t use them, but I was unbelievably touched that he’d probably had a crack at writing his first and only song.
