Improvising's Not Easy - And Ninety-five Per Cent Of It Was Just Sh*t!”

Australian psych rock band Pond have a strange approach to creating songs – applying modern editing to old-fashioned jamming. Multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson talks us through it...

- Grant Moon

They’re a hip Australian collective whose fun, imaginative music blurs the boundaries between synth-pop, prog, psych and rock. When they tour, they’re equally at home on a Glastonbury stage or headlining a sold-out club night of their own. Some members also play with fellow Perth star Kevin Parker, AKA neo-psych act Tame Impala. Their early works led to inevitable comparisons with early Pink Floyd, but a French music blog once described a tune of theirs as a ‘Lenny Kravitz nightmare’. It’s hard to judge where Pond land on the musical spectrum. Maybe their own multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson can help?

“I suppose it depends which way you look at it,” he muses from his home studio in Perth. He’s surrounded by vintage synths, guitars, and piles of effects pedals teeter on his shelves. “Pond are either an incredibly successful band that makes basically pop music, or a very strange band that’s deliberately obtuse for the sake of it. With every record we try and make the songs better, but also we try and make them more and more messed up, because that’s what we like.”

That’s certainly true of their ninth, self-produced album. Following on from 2019’s acclaimed Tasmania, 9 sees Pond – Watson, singer/guitarist Nick Allbrook, guitarist Joe Ryan, keyboardist Jamie Terry and drummer James Ireland – on powerful creative form. From psych- and harmony-soaked opener Song For Agnes to trippy, guitar-led closer Toast, this is a refreshing dip into their unique sound-world, one born of old-fashioned jamming, modern editing, piles of weird gear and a ton of good ideas.