Former Tame Impala bassist Nick Allbrook and current Tame Impala bassist Cam Avery (that’s not a typo) both have quite a few new releases due for the second half of the year.
The Perth-bred musicians are both in the lineup for Pond, who launch Hobo Rocket – the band’s latest album – on August 2nd and also have another album for their side-project Allbrook/Avery in the can. It’s under this latter guise that the band have yet another record in the pipeline, a collaborative album with UK band The Horrors, as NME reports.
The as-yet-untitled album features Allbrook/Avery along with four-fifths of The Horrors line-up, with whom the band share not only a shared love of psychedelic sounds and innovative production, but a stage – back when The Horrors toured Australia for Laneway 2012.
Allbrook tells NME that The Horrors’ guitarist/pianist Josh Hayward owed him a favour “because he threw a bag of pedals at my face in Australia once, the wanker,” resulting in the collaborative effort between the Aussie duo and the self-described British ‘zombie punks’. “[The Horrors are] hardworking little muppets… I’d love to get them to play like a reincarnation of the band that actually recorded the album.” Nick Allbrook, Pond
“Nick’s right,” jokes Hayward, “we were completely conned into making this record with them. Coffin Joe [Spurgeon, drummer] sold my services while I was passed out in Perth and on hearing the news I was apprehensive. I shouldn’t have been, after a week living on nothing but rum punch, abiding by their rules of two-take recording and preventing Cam [Avery] from playing AC/DC at every given opportunity we had a great record.”
Hayward and Spurgeon, along with Horrors members Tom Cowan and Rhys Webb all feature on the Allbrook/Avery collaborative effort, as well as appearances from Jerome Watson of London band The History Of Apple Pie, Holly Warren from Novella, and Spectrum’s Jason Holt.
The Horrors and Allbrook/Avery album is just one of a swathe of new releases from the members of Pond, as revealed earlier in the year by band member Jay Watson, who also played with Allbrook in Tame Impala until he departed the Tame Impala lineup to “screw his head back on.”
“They’ve just been piling up,” Allbrook tells FasterLouder of the wave of new projects and albums. “I did one pretty much by myself ages ago, and then me and him [Avery] did another one, sitting around in our sharehouse with our friend Ash McClain playing drums. That’s sort of half EP, half album. I guess it’s like 11 songs, so that’s an album.”
The Pond frontman adds that he might delay the collaborative album with The Horrors for a potential Australian tour. “I’d like to wait for the third one, so that we can make a big party of the shows,” explains Allbrook. “It would be super fun to wait until they’re [here on tour]. They’re hardworking little muppets, running around all the time. I’d love to get them to play like a reincarnation of the band that actually recorded the album. So we’ll probably wait for that.”
In the meantime, Pond are gearing up for the release of Hobo Rocket next month, the follow-up to last year’s Beard Wives Denim; if the first two offerings of Hobo Rocket – the “cretaceous-era space-rock jam” of ‘Giant Tortoise‘ and second single ‘Xanman‘ – are anything to go by, fans will not be disappointed.
Pond and their label Modular are also hosting secret listening parties next week ahead of the record’s August 2nd release and Tone Deaf is offering the chance to win a double-pass to each of the Melbourne and Sydney listening events, head here to enter.
