MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden has joined forces with Pond for a reimagined version of the latter band’s track “So Lo”.
Under VanWyngarden’s spell, the art-house funk number features danceability so typical of MGMT, which is just what Pond ordered.
“We asked Andrew if he could take ‘So Lo’ further into the concrete New York late night for us and he went above and beyond,” Pond co-founder Jay Watson shares. “I love the darker chorus he made, it completely changes the feel of the melody. We’ve been MGMT fans and mates with them for such a long time, so we were stoked when he sent this back!”
You can watch the accompanying visualiser for VanWyngarden’s reimagined version, created by musician and artists Raissa Pardini, below.
“So Lo” featured on Pond’s latest album, Stung!, which was released last month and reached #2 on the ARIA Australian Albums Chart the week of release.
“I think Gum was just messing around on guitar playing something fun and cheesy and then realised it could be cool in a kind of cold, concrete, No-Wave way,” the psych-rock band’s frontman Nick Allbrook said of “So Lo”.
“I wrote the line about white dreads while waiting for a bus in Tottenham – maybe there were some hippies around, maybe there weren’t, who can really say where hippies are or aren’t at any given time… The words were “all these tablets got me breaking in two” but when I first double tracked the vocals they were a bit out of time and gum thought I said, ‘These tummy tablets got me breaking in two,’ which made us laugh, and thus, by the laws of Pond, became official.
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“Some of the lyrics are sad, honestly, about watching your future as you’d imagined it evaporate before your eyes – being haunted by “a child as brittle as paper.” Gum thought I was saying “horny badger, brittle as paper,” but that was a bridge too far, even for us. This song sort of skirts between being horrendously bleak and really dumb. The vocoder Gin and Gum put on “so European” absolutely kills me.”
Stung! received positive reviews from critics upon its release,
“Always adventurous and unafraid to tackle different genres, it’s surprising that it has taken until album 10 for WA’s Pond to release a double album,” wrote Rolling Stone AU/NZ in a four-star review.
“There’s plenty to savour, including glam-funk stomper ‘(I’m) Stung’, Seventies-rock freak-out ‘Neon River’, and epic centrepiece ‘Edge of the World Pt. 3’.
“Sounding like an obscure psych-pop gem from another era, Stung! is Pond in fine, sprawling form.”
After recently completing their Australian tour, Pond now look towards a run of tour dates across the UK and Europe in September and October. They’ll follow that with a North American tour with Fazerdaze the following month.
Pond’s “So Lo” (Andrew VanWyngarden remix) is out now.
