Not even interviews are free from the pull. After all, asking musicians to comment on Donald Trump’s presidency has become the kind of easy opener journos rely on, the new, “So what’s the meaning behind your band’s name?”
But it feels particularly relevant when a conversation with Pond frontman Nicholas Allbrook careens towards talk of conflict – and it’s not just because the lead single from his band’s upcoming album The Weather isportentously titled 3000 Megatons.
To add to the anxiety, his chat with Beat is going down a mere two hours after the US has fired off 59 Tomahawks into Syria, a portent that one can imagine a history student encountering in a handout a hundred years from now: an aside printed under a heading that reads ‘causes leading up to the war.’
“It makes me very anxious,” Allbrook says simply. “It makes me very anxious.” And there in the background, anachronistically enough, is soothing birdsong – he’s taking his interviews in a park under a tree. “But that’s usually when or why I write music.”
Not that his music frees him from self-doubt, mind you. International conflict is less some periphery concern for Allbrook than it is a pressing part of his lived experience: he witnessed a lot of turmoil first hand last year while living in Europe, moving over to the continent after falling in love with a French woman. “There was a lot of shit going on in France and the borders of France, and my life, and the world,” he says.
“I always feel like, ‘Oh, [I’m releasing] another album, with another well-designed cover and a profound and classic and simple name, and a genre underneath it and a scorecard.’ It just feels incredibly fucking futile in the context of people burning themselves alive on an offshore prison, for example.”
Allbrook is also tested by the creative process itself. Writing a Pond record isn’t a case of idly communing with the muses, or simply leaning back and letting the creative urge take over – it is work, as trying and testing as a lot of other jobs. “It takes so much time, and so much self-flagellation. It’s spent thinking you suck.
“I think that’s just the creative process. It’s putting your net out there into the cosmos and seeing what you’ve fucked up, and then changing, and then doing it again, and again, and again, until it resembles what you’ve thought of in the first place.”
And yet ultimately, even despite the trials associated with making music, Allbrook believes that the songs can convey something that is fundamentally him – or at least, he thinks they can. “I’m hoping that my individuality is so strong that it always shines through.” There’s a pause, then laughter. “I just realised that people can’t read sarcasm. I don’t know if there’s a kind of little sarcastic quotation mark that you can put in? Someone should invent those.”
In any case, even if the music can’t act as one big diary, Allbrook is still always buoyed by the reception from Pond’s fans. “I’m constantly encouraged: I get straight-to-my-face, impossible to ignore encouragement from people that I’ve never met before, saying, ‘Please don’t stop making music, it means a lot to me.’ I can’t really ignore that. I don’t have to create my own legitimacy. I think people are nice enough to do it for me.”
It helps too that music remains a profound form of catharsis for Allbrook. You can tell that by listening to his records: even a seemingly absurd and surreal song like Heroic Shart bristles with a crashing kind of warmth. “I like anthemic music,” he explains. “I like stuff with that quality. That Queen and Kanye vibe.
“There’s so much music that has that immediacy, that’s so bold and huge, like Prince and OutKast, or Peter Bibby. It always feels with Bibby’s music that it’s spilling out of him.”
The same could be said of The Weather. It has that spontaneity too; that hard-to-define bigness and scale that fans of the band have always been attracted to. Indeed, given its sheer scope, it almost feels like the prototypical Pond record; like their signature statement, an entry point for newcomers and a victory lap for those who love them.
But however it is received, Allbrook is just happy that the work is done: that it stands as close to his vision as he’s going to get. “It’s a feeling of great elation when you look or listen to your creation,” he says. “You smile, and feel good about this new thing. It’s a great feeling. It makes me happy.”
He considers, “Although sometimes I listen to my own things and think, ‘Fuck Nick. What are you doing? What’s the point? What’s the point of this thing being out in the world?’ And sometimes I listen to it and think, ‘This is a groundbreaking masterpiece. Move over Cezanne.’
“Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.” There’s more laughter; a pause; a little bit of birdsong. “Art’s a confusing fucking thing,” he sighs, happily.
Words by Joseph Earp
Image by Matt Sav
