Music

YouTube Jukebox With Nick Allbrook From Pond

A few months after quitting Tame Impala, the Pond frontman offers up an increasingly bizarre compilation ahead of their fifth album, Hobo Rocket.

by Steph Harmon 22 July 2013

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In May this year, bassist Nick Allbrook announced that he was leaving Tame Impala.

To quit a band in their prime is not an easy decision, but the never-ending album and touring cycle of Tame had left little time for Allbrook to focus on his other varied projects. Like the series of bizarre books he’s working on with writer Amber Fresh (“They’re for drunk people and children,” he told FasterLouder). And the collaboration with his Tame Impala replacement Cam Avery, Allbrook/Avery – who are working on their third album with members of The Horrors. And the Tame Impala side-project which, over the past few years, has turned into a pretty big deal in its own right: Pond.

Fronted by Allbrook, Pond is filled out by Tame Impala’s Jay Watson and Cam Avery, along with fellow Perth-based musos Joseph Ryan and Jamie Terry. Together, they revel in the kind of revisionist, tangential, jam-filled psych rock you’d expect from a band of that pedigree — but, led by Allbrook’s ramshackle Jagger swagger, it’s all a bit rougher, rawer, and looser around the edges. Their fourth album, Beards, Wives, Denim, was their most acclaimed, and threw the band into the fickle world of buzz; never ones for understatement, NME declared them ‘The Hottest New Band In The World‘.

So there’s quite a bit riding on their follow-up: the Kevin Parker-produced Hobo Rocket, which comes out on August 2. To celebrate, the band put together a YouTube compilation which, introduced and interrupted by an Autotuned Allbrook, is disparate, varied and rude: “There’ll be hopefully something for everyone,” he explains. “Especially if you enjoy ass-pumpin’ beats and massive screamers and really immature humour. Enjoy.”