Tasmania

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Psych Rock

• saturated
• euphoric
• coastal

About

The sheer amount of stuff happening on Pond’s eighth album would be enough to fling a lesser band into unmanageable chaos. But more is more for the Western Australian psychedelic experimentalists, and on <i>Tasmania</i> that chaos is harnessed and transformed into something wild, digestible, and brilliant. As with their other records, <i>Tasmania</i> was co-produced by longtime friend and former bandmate Kevin Parker (of Tame Impala). The extended musical family brings together a staggering array of ideas, instrumentation, and sounds with remarkable fluidity. Thematically, the album's poignant environmentalism follows on from 2017’s <i>The Weather</i>. On both eight-minute epic “Burnt Out Star” and the title track, singer Nick Allbrook repeats the sentiment “I might go and shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes/While paradise burns in Australia.” He takes aim at those who considered <i>The Weather</i> to be a statement rather than the simple truth on “Hand Mouth Dancer”: “So you got political, can you speak on that?/I didn’t get political, I just faced the facts.” Of course, there's much more to <i>Tasmania</i> than that. “Selené” is a story about a “young love…who took a little too much speed and fucked his guts up and his teeth,” while “Shame,” perhaps the band's most un-Pond-like track ever, is subtle, glassy, and sparse. “The Boys Are Killing Me,” one of their best songs to date, is a groovy psych-pop epic about Australia's destructive culture of toxic masculinity that was co-written by Indigenous activists John Watson and Annie Milgin. Over a decade into their career, <i>Tasmania</i> finds Pond at once more adventurous and more refined than ever.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits