The world’s in such a bad state that even psych-rockers are starting to get a little freaked out. “While the whole world melts, am I just meant to watch?” Nick Allbrook of Australian mind-melters Pond asks on “Sixteen Days,” one of a few deceptively groovy tracks on the band’s eighth album, Tasmania. Over the stretched-out glam of the title track, he promises with a wistful ache in his voice, “I might go and shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes/And paradise burns in Australia, who knows?”
The band described their latest—which also marks their international major-label debut, on the perpetually alt-friendly Interscope—as a “sister album” to 2017’s zonked-out The Weather, an album that Allbrook described to NME as “laying out all the dark things underneath the shimmering exterior of cranes, development, money and white privilege.” This demonstration of social awareness is relatively new to Pond, a fact that Allbrook self-reflexively addresses over the oscillating synths of “Hand Mouth Dancer”: “So you got political, can you speak on that?/I didn’t get political, I just faced the facts.” Ideologically, it’s heavy stuff from a band who once wrote a song called “Heroic Shart.”
Growth comes in many forms, and the increasingly clued-in lyrical trajectory isn’t the only way in which Pond are changing. Through their career, the revolving-door outfit has reliably pumped out albums chock full of psych-rock featuring more twists and turns than a waterslide—the Aussie analogue to Ty Segall’s own dutiful commitment to acid-fried garage rock. But The Weather marked a point in the band’s decade-long career when their pop instincts—previously experienced in brief fits between static obscurities and the acoustic left-turn or two—approached the point of full bloom; on Tasmania, Pond’s melodic gifts are as richly realized as the cherry blossoms name-checked in the album’s opening moments.
If you’ve made it this far into this review, you’re well aware that Pond shares a few members with the touring lineup of Tame Impala—godhead Kevin Parker has produced the Pond’s previous five albums, including Tasmania. Until now, any similarities between the two acts have been purely cosmetic—a colorful guitar doodle here, a widescreen synth-bomb there—but Tasmania marks the point in which Pond seem to be directly taking cues from Tame Impala. Specifically: the rubbery R&B-pop of 2015’s shimmering, emotive Currents, a sound that fits Pond surprisingly well. “The Boys Are Killing Me” is a lovely slow-jam that effortlessly transitions into the kind of massive, mind-expanding breakdown that’s become Parker’s calling card; even the album’s trippiest epic, the eight-minute “Burnt Out Star,” resembles less a full-on freakout than it does a few seamlessly edited melodic suites a la Currents’ squishy, sprawling “Let It Happen.”
On that latter song, Allbrook takes a break from Tasmania’s contemplative doom-and-gloom to wax lyrical on carnal concerns, turning out one of the album’s cleverest lyrics in the process: “She said it’d be romantic if you didn’t use the door/Safe to say I don’t see windows the same no more.” The louche observation calls to mind the seedy, hetero-centric ’80s evocations found on Sydney sax-a-holic Alex Cameron’s Forced Witness from 2017. The soft-rock glow that Tasmania frequently adopts represents a triangulation between Cameron’s yacht-rock yarns, Tame Impala’s starry-eyed neurotic daydreams, and Pond’s wonderfully knotty guitar fantasias. It’s a more straightforward and accessible sound that might leave past admirers missing the all-out weirdness of albums past, but the evolution that Tasmania represents also speaks to the fact that the main constant in Pond’s approach is change. Even as the sea levels keep rising, they’ll doubtless find new waves to ride.
