POND Release 'Live At Lodge Room' & North American Tour Starts Next Month
POND RELEASE
LIVE AT LODGE ROOM
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR STARTS NEXT MONTH
LATEST ALBUM STUNG! OUT NOW VIA SPINNING TOP RECORDS
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR
With special guest Fazerdaze
11.12.24 - Royale - Boston, MA
11.13.24 - Brooklyn Steel - Brooklyn, NY
11.14.24 - Union Transfer - Philadelphia, PA
11.16.24 - 9:30 Club - Washington, DC
11.17.24 - Mr. Smalls Theatre - Pittsburgh, PA
11.19.24 - Danforth Music Hall - Toronto, ON
11.20.24 - St. Andrew’s Hall - Detroit, MI
11.22.24 - Vic Theatre - Chicago, IL
11.23.24 - First Avenue - Minneapolis, MN
11.28.24 - Commodore Ballroom - Vancouver, BC
11.29.24 - Neptune Theatre - Seattle, WA
11.30.24 - Revolution Hall - Portland, OR
12.3.24 - The Warfield - San Francisco, CA
12.5.24 - The Wiltern - Los Angeles, CA
ahead of their highly anticipated return to North America, Pond have released Live at Lodge Room, a full concert video chronicling their triumphant US tour stop earlier this year in Los Angeles. The band have been on a worldwide tour throughout most of 2024 in support of their new studio album Stung!. With a fully sold-out tour in their home country of Australia and a near sell out tour of the UK and Europe that wrapped last week, the band will now return to the US and Canada beginning November 12th at Royale in Boston, MA. Purchase tickets for the upcoming tour HERE. Live At Lodge Room was shot and directed by Kristofski and can be watched HERE.
Nicholas Allbrook on Live at Lodge Room
The Lodge Room show was deep into a really great, really hot, sweaty tour of the South. We had the best time eating crawfish and playing brand new songs from Stung! in a giant pool of sweat, so by the time we got to LA we weren't even ready to kill each other at all. We were actually really psyched, not even sick thanks to the heat I reckon. Then our dear friend (and my Astral Twin) Sam Kristofski came and filmed everything and made us look super cool - something he's really good at. This was a high point of one of the easiest and most fun tours we've done for ages. I believe we actually high fived and hugged at the end like a cheesy movie.
June 21st saw Pond share their tenth album, Stung!, to critical acclaim across the globe; with Uncut, MOJO, Rolling Stone Aus, DIY, Dork and Clash all publishing 4-star reviews on the LP. UPROXX wrote “Rimming with fuzzed-out guitar tones, bombastic drumming, and alluring sonic trickery." The latest offering from Stung! is a remix of album track “So Lo” by MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden. This reimagined composition arrives with a visualiser created by musician and artist Raissa Pardini.
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.
On Stung! you’ll find some of Pond’s most glorious rock songs ever and also some of their least rock moments, all psychedelic drapery or funk vim. In that epic, as in Stung! at large, Allbrook speaks to our collective modern paradox of being disappointed in or even disconsolate over a world that we know more about than any prior generation but also being in awe of it and (sometimes) each other, too. There are so many reasons to cry and so many reasons to marvel. Can’t they all, Pond suggests with Stung!, be reasons to sing?
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, with GUM just recently releasing a collaborative full-length album with Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs). 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 realized 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 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.
CATCH POND ON TOUR THIS NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER
Tickets on sale now via pond.band
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