Just a couple of weeks ago, Jay Watson, of the Australian psych-rock band Pond, released Blue Gum Way, the latest album from his side project Gum. So it's a little surprising to see that Pond are back at full strength and that they're releasing new music this quickly, but that's what's happening. Today, they release a very cool new single.
Pond's most recent album Stung! came out in 2024. Today, they're back with "Terrestrials," the kind of songs that sounds huge from the first time you hear it. This one is hitting me this morning. It's got all this strutting, preening glam-rock/new wave energy, but it's too weird and oblique to play as pure pastiche. Here's what Pond's Nicholas Allbrook says about this track:
Gum wrote the music for this one, and we recorded this in Mullumbimby with Julian Abbott at Nowave studio. 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.
Check out the Jesse Taylor Smith-directed "Terrestrials" video below.
"Terrestrials" is out now on Mangovision/Secretly Distribution. Pond will open some of Djo's North American tour dates this summer.
