Pond ‘Terrestrials’ Review: Less Sometimes Is Really More

For their 11th studio album, Terrestrials, Pond walked into the recording studio with a short, almost monastic list of prohibitions: no fuzz pedal, no ballads, and none of what they cheerfully call “Pink Floyd shit.” In other words, the Perth five-piece went back to basics, a move that, for some bands, might be interpreted as a retreat from excess. In this case, though, less Pond certainly doesn’t mean lesser Pond. Strip away most of the frills, and what comes through is the dread this band has spent much of its career dressing up in sequins.

Pond emerged from the same Fremantle bedrooms as Tame Impala, swapped members with Kevin Parker’s project for years, and spent a decade filed under “side band” while quietly out-weirding their more famous counterpart via baroque suites, shaggy humor, and song titles like “Heroic Shart.” Their last album, 2024’s Stung!, was a longer, looser effort that felt like a victory lap for everything they’d built since 2008. The self-released Terrestrials is, at just 10 tracks, leaner and more minimalist by comparison. It’s also a deliberate step out of both Tame Impala’s shadow and a deviation from the band’s propensity for irony.

The stylistic mission that Pond lands on here fuses sun-bleached ’80s Australiana with the eyeliner-smeared post-punk of Sisters of Mercy and Magazine. Opener “Skyworks” sets the terms with a windows-down groove that turns psychedelic as the lyrics tell an ominous story about an encroaching climate crisis. Elsewhere, “Casuarina” scales up bright and big, with glammed up hooks that feel built for a festival crowd. All while Nick Allbrook’s clean guitar lines and Jay Watson’s taut drumming give many of the songs a pub-rock immediacy.

The album’s anger comes into sharpest focus on “Two Hands,” which Allbrook wrote in response to Rio Tinto’s 2020 detonation of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, where 46,000 years of Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura heritage were erased for iron ore. The song builds a sleek, funky stomp toward a call to arms: “Our two hands can make a fist.” Allbrook frames the corporation’s apology as farce—they “apologized sincerely,” he spits, when they “downed the church”—and promises the dug-up “bauxite” will someday “rejoin the stars.”

The title track answers all this with the most Australian phrase imaginable, “She’ll be right,” repeated until the reassurance curdles into the exact complacency that lets a sacred site fall. The song distills the whole album, welding the psych jams and the pub stompers into one churning catechism. Over drums that genuinely rip, Allbrook chants, “Unborn tomorrows and dead yesterdays,” and gathers “psychotics, infants and lovers and saints,” and “killers and mothers and sinners” too. The sound itself is smooth, while the words are rough as gravel.

“Through the Heather” proves that Pond can be understated while honoring its ban on ballads, threading codeine-blurred isolation—“a war was overhead, and I was all alone in bed”—through synths that feel like calm on a crowded street. The self-imposed constraints, though, at times narrow the band’s range. “Personal Hell” aims for minor-key, gothic-horror vamp, but it delivers a chorus thinner than its verses deserve, while “The Fatal Shore” rides one hook in circles.

By the album’s final third, a recurring guitar riff starts to read as a tic rather than a motif. It’s a cost of a band that swore off its widest gestures and sometimes falls short of the dynamic range those indulgences once gave them. Yet the gamble mostly pays off. For a group whose entire myth rests on more—more pedals, more jokes, more cosmic sprawl—the bravest move was to do less, and the clarity it buys turns out to be the most genuinely psychedelic trick in Pond’s kit. Clear the haze and you can clearly see that the class clowns were grieving the whole time.