Tag: Nicholas Allbrook

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: POND Shares Rousingly Anthemic Yet Existential “Terrestrials”

Today, Perth-based JOVM mainstays POND — currently, Nicholas Allbrook (lead vocals, guitar, keys, bass, flute, slide guitar and drums); singer/songwriter and producer Jay Watson (vocals, guitar, keys, drums, synths and bass), who’s also the creative mastermind of acclaimed JOVM mainstay outfit GUM and a touring member of acclaimed, Grammy Award-nominated JOVM mainstays Tame Impala; Joe Ryan (vocals, guitar, bass, 12 string guitar, slide guitar); Jamie Terry (keys, bass, synths, organs, guitar); and Jamie Ireland (drums, keys) — have shared a new single, “Terrestrials,” the first bit o new material from the Aussie outfit since 2024’s Stung!

“Terrestrials” begins with a meditative and slow-burning intro, before quickly morphing into a bombastic rocker, anchored around fuzz and phased out guitars, glistening synths that showcases the band’s unerring knack for incredibly catchy hooks and rousingly anthemic choruses. Thematically, the song is a meditation on the great mystery and contradiction of humanity, a species capable of great love and great cruelty — often simultaneously.

“Gum wrote the music for this one and we recorded this in Mullumbimby with Julian Abbott at Nowave studio,” POND’s Nicholas Allbrook explains. “This song is about the weirdest of all the terrestrials, people. Hellbent on flying away from or killing our home soil, with a big appetite for destruction, guns, roses. We can love and connect and nurture and inflict unbearable cruelty. You all know this but, yeah, it’s kind of a great mystery isn’t it? It’s almost more supernatural than extraterrestrials. Which is probably why we wrote this song. There aren’t many of us who can forget for even a second about the unborn tomorrows and dead yesterdays but among them are, apparently, kids and people in love. My cousin Iz helped write this with our chats.” 

Directed by Jesse Taylor Smith, the accompanying video is a mix of live performance footage and trippy animation.

Along with the new single and video, POND announced that they will be opening for Djo — the musical project of producer, singer/songwriter, musician and actor, Joe Kerry, best known for his roles in Stranger Things and Fargo for a handful of East Coast dates, including a July 17, 2026 stop at Forest Hills Stadium. Tour dates are below. Tickets will go on sale Friday, March 20, 2026 at 10:00am local time.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: POND Shares Funky “So Lo”

Founded back in 2008, acclaimed Perth-based JOVM mainstays POND — currently, songwriter and producer Jay Watson (vocals, guitar, keys, drums, synths and bass), who’s also the creative mastermind of acclaimed JOVM mainstay outfit GUM and a touring member of acclaimed, Grammy Award-nominated JOVM mainstays Tame Impala; Nicholas Allbook (lead vocals, guitar, keys, bass, flute, slide guitar and drums; Joe Ryan (vocals, guitar, bass, 12 string guitar, slide guitar); Jamie Terry (keys, bass, synths, organs, guitar); and Jamie Ireland (drums, keys) — have released nine critically applauded albums that have seen the band’s sound gradually morph into increasingly synth-driven psych pop.

The Perth-based outfit’s last four albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity: 10 songs/ideas tucked into 40 minutes or so. Slated for a June 21, 2024 release through Spinning Top Music, the acclaimed JOVM mainstays’ 10th album Stung! sees the band gleefully, madly and willfully lean into the largesse of the double LP, tapping into the spirit of albums like Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times with a 14-song effort that may arguably be the most unfettered hour of their career.

Being a band for the better part of two decades, the members of Pond have accepted — with no small joy or relief — that they are no longer beholden to shifting expectations of cool. That idea has greatly empowered them, allowing them to play precisely what they want, to not move toward any goal but being themselves. 

Granted, it takes a lot more effort for the band to make a record these days: They’re all adults with relationships, children, professional obligations, hobbies, side-projects and/or some mix of them all. In fact, last year, Allbrook released a solo album and Watson released a fantastic GUM album — and both members went on fairly extensive tours to support those efforts. 

The band began making Stung! in piecemeal fashion with a member or two showing up at Watson’s little backyard studio to work on a new idea. They’d thinker joyously and endlessly in Watson’s little workshop, trying out a panoply of machines and widgets to get interesting sounds. This allowed them to let the songs they were working on to sit over time, so that their deeply democratic process could not only siphon and improve the best ones, but also tease out what the album was missing. 

Of course, at some time the band realized that they were running the risk of being stuck in that phase — creation, adjustment, addition — forever. So, the quintet went to Dunsborough, a scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast, where a friend had recently finished a spacious, state-of-the-art studio. While in Dunsborough, Allbrook would run near the shore every morning. They’d all swim during the day, then record deep in the night. Most of their ancillary gear was left at home, forcing them to drill down on the songs, ideas and sounds they already had, and to make them better without getting overly carried away in endless possibility. After nearly a year of writing and workshopping, the JOVM mainstays had plenty of material for what would be the most expansive album of their career to date. 

The album’s title began as an in joke for the band, a reference to having a crush on someone or something that they began to use so often that they felt they just had to call the album that. They still laugh when they hear it now, a silly inside wisecrack suddenly open to the outside world. But for the band, it’s kind of a credo too: Despite the bruises, the callousness and suffering of both every day life and the music industry, they remain stung with music, with the idea of making songs that feel just so and doing it together, as friends. And that they’re still stung with the world, too, even when it bites back. 

Last month, I wrote about Stung album single “(I’m) Stung,” a defiantly upbeat, big-hearted and wearily resilient song anchored around strummed overdriven acoustic guitar, buzzing power chords, big shout along worthy hooks and choruses and a a laid-back trippy groove serving as a supple and dreamy bed for Allbook’s heartbroken yet proud delivery, which expresses a bitterly uneasy acceptance.

“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,” Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook says. “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.”

Stung‘s third and latest single “So Lo” is funky No Wave-meets-New Wave jam anchored around squiggling and angular funk guitar, reverb gated drums that sound like whip cracks, a supple and sinuous bass line, bursts of glistening synth arpeggios, and an overdrive-fueled guitar solo. “So Lo” is among the most dance floor friendly songs of their growing catalog, but while subtly recalling a synthesis of Don Henley‘s “All She Wants To Do Dance,” 80s Motown and DEVO. Allbrook’s punchy delivery sings lyrics that are times kind of goofy and at other times bitterly heartbroken. But somehow, the song’s narrator is desperately trying to keep sane and afloat in a mad, mad, mad world.

“I think Gum was just messing around on guitar playing something fun and cheesy and then realized it could be cool in a kind of cold, concrete, No-Wave way,” POND’s Nicholas Allbrook says. “I wrote the line about white dreads while waiting for a bus in Tottenham – maybe there were some hippies around, maybe there weren’t, who can really say where hippies are or aren’t at any given time… The words were ‘all these tablets got me breaking in two’ but when I first double tracked the vocals they were a bit out of time and gum thought I said, ‘these tummy tablets got me breaking in two’ which made us laugh, and thus, by the laws of Pond, became official. Some of the lyrics are sad honestly, about watching your future as you’d imagined it evaporate before your eyes – being haunted by ‘a child as brittle as paper.’ Gum thought I was saying ‘horny badger, brittle as paper’ but that was a bridge too far, even for us. This song sort of skirts between being horrendously bleak and really dumb. The vocoder Gin and Gum put on ‘so European’ absolutely kills me.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: POND Shares Weary and Resilient “(I’m) Stung”

Founded back in 2008, acclaimed Perth-based JOVM mainstays POND — currently, songwriter and producer Jay Watson (vocals, guitar, keys, drums, synths and bass), who’s also the creative mastermind of acclaimed JOVM mainstay outfit GUM and a touring member of acclaimed, Grammy Award-nominated JOVM mainstays Tame Impala; Nicholas Allbook (lead vocals, guitar, keys, bass, flute, slide guitar and drums; Joe Ryan (vocals, guitar, bass, 12 string guitar, slide guitar); Jamie Terry (keys, bass, synths, organs, guitar); and Jamie Ireland (drums, keys) — have released nine critically applauded albums that have seen the band’s sound gradually morph into increasingly synth-driven psych pop.

The Perth-based outfit’s last four albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity: 10 songs/ideas tucked into 40 minutes or so. Slated for a June 21, 2024 release through Spinning Top Music, the acclaimed JOVM mainstays’ 10th album Stung! sees the band gleefully, madly and willfully lean into the largesse of the double LP, tapping into the spirit of albums like Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times with a 14-song effort that may arguably be the most unfettered hour of their career.

Being a band for the better part of two decades, the members of Pond have accepted — with no small joy or relief — that they are no longer beholden to shifting expectations of cool. That idea has greatly empowered them, allowing them to play precisely what they want, to not move toward any goal but being themselves.

Granted, it takes a lot more effort to the band to make a record these days: They’re all adults with relationships, children, professional obligations, hobbies, side-projects and/or some mix of them all. In fact, last year, Allbrook released a solo album and Watson released a fantastic GUM album — and both members went on fairly extensive tours to support those efforts.

The band began making Stung! in piecemeal fashion with a member or two showing up at Watson’s little backyard studio to work on a new idea. They’d thinker joyously and endlessly in Watson’s little workshop, trying out a panoply of machines and widgets to get interesting sounds. This allowed them to let the songs they were working on to sit over time, so that their deeply democratic process could not only siphon and improve the best ones, but also tease out what the album was missing.

Of course, at some time the band realized that they were running the risk of being stuck in that phase — creation, adjustment, addition — forever. So, the quintet went to Dunsborough, a scenic surfing hub on Australia’s southwestern coast, where a friend had recently finished a spacious, state-of-the-art studio. While in Dunsborough, Allbrook would run near the shore every morning. They’d all swim during the day, then record deep in the night. Most of their ancillary gear was left at home, forcing them to drill down on the songs, ideas and sounds they already had, and to make them better without getting overly carried away in endless possibility. After nearly a year of writing and workshopping, the JOVM mainstays had plenty of material for what would be the most expansive album of their career to date.

The album’s title began as an in joke for the band, a reference to having a crush on someone or something that they began to use so often that they felt they just had to call the album that. They still laugh when they hear it now, a silly inside wisecrack suddenly open to the outside world. But for the band, it’s kind of a credo too: Despite the bruises, the callousness and suffering of both every day life and the music industry, they remain stung with music, with the idea of making songs that feel just so and doing it together, as friends. And that they’re still stung with the world, too, even when it bites back.

Stung!‘s second and latest single, “(I’m) Stung” is a defiantly upbeat, big hearted and wearily resilient song anchored around strummed overdriven acoustic guitar, buzzing power chords, big shout along worthy hooks and choruses and a laid-back trippy groove serving as a supple and dreamily bed for Allbrook’s heartbroken yet proud delivery, expressing a bitterly uneasy acceptance.

“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,” Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook says. “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.”

Filmed by Pond and Chris Adams, edited by Jamie Terry and color graded by Tom Dunphy is shot on a Super 8 and follows the members of the band on a sand bank: Allbrook is shirtless and in silver body paint from face down to his waist. The rest of the band — Watson, Ryan, Terry and Ireland — are in silver lame outfits. A bee kite flies just above them. And throughout, Allbrook vamps like a mad Mick Jagger. Allbrook and The rest of the band walks the top of the embankment or slides down it, goofing off and in many ways attempting to not get stung — unsuccessfully.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Nicholas Allbrook Shares Shimmering “Jackie”

Nicholas Allbrook is an acclaimed Western Australian-born and-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist. painter and producer. Since starting his artistic career, Allbrook has brought community and collaboration to the forefront of his artistic and creative method — both as a solo artist and with POND. Allbrook has also collaborated with Aussie and international acts alike. including King Krule, Cate Le Bon, Cuco and Holy Fuck among others.

Through his career, Allbrook has shown a deep understanding of the human experience and the importance of art in modern society. His fourth solo album, the Allbrook and Nathaniel Hoho (a.k.a. HOKO) co-produced Manganese is slated for a July 9, 2023 release through Spinning Top Music . The album reportedly is a psyche pop wonderland that captures the sound of a musician with a symphony in his back pocket, a thorough history of 80s Oz-rock in his rearview mirror and modern Australia in his sights.

“Jackie,” Manganese‘s latest single is a mid-tempo, swooning ballad centered around twinkling synths, strummed guitar, a sinuous bass line and a rousingly anthemic hook paired with Allbrook’s plaintive vocal. Seemingly indebted to 80s pop, “Jackie” is a bittersweet song that grapples with loss, grief and hope for peace in the afterlife — or whatever is beyond this.

“This song is about my friend (whose name isn’t Jackie) who died in 2021,” Allbrook explains. “She was fantastic and the news left me with familiar feelings of guilt and regret and ‘why didn’t I do more or know better?’ I don’t usually get hit with creative bolts while running, but by the canal once in London I was struck with the hopeful image of her rowing away from the earth that had been so hurtful and hard, on a black lake surrounded by stars, finally finding peace and silence. It felt nice to think about death like that, bathed in pale silver light rather than just cold. I got lots of instrumental help from Nathaniel Hoho, who bizarrely and brilliantly put in the nature documentary voice about the giant panda which should never work but somehow does.”

Directed by Alex Haygarth, the accompanying video for “Jackie” is split between Allbrook in full Thin White Duke mode, playing acoustic guitar while bathed in spotlight with flecks of starlight around him. We also see drag performance artist Ash Baroque expressively dancing and lip synching to the song, making the video seem as though it’s a duet between two dear friends — one just departed, one still here in the mortal coil.