''9'' is the ninth studio album by Australian psychedelic rock band

Pond A pond is an area filled with water, either natural or artificial, that is smaller than a lake. Defining them to be less than in area, less than deep, and with less than 30% emergent vegetation helps in distinguishing their ecology from ...

. It was released on 1 October 2021 by Spinning Top Records. The album was produced by the band themselves, the first since 2012's '' Beard, Wives, Denim'' to not be co-produced by former member Kevin Parker, with bandmates

Jay Watson Jay Watson (born 27 May 1990 ) is an Australian multi-instrumentalist, producer, singer and songwriter. He is best known as a member of the psychedelic rock bands Tame Impala and Pond. Watson records solo material under the name GUM and, as of 2 ...

and James Ireland on mixing duties. ''9'' became the band's first ARIA top ten album, debuting at number 6 on the chart. A deluxe version of the album was released on 20 May 2022.

Background

The album was announced on 20 May 2021, alongside second single "America's Cup". Upon announcement, Nick Allbrook said "We'd settled into a pretty tight routine with the last few albums and wanted to shake a boat with this so we started off with filling a few tape reels with some absolutely heinous improvised sonic babble which, after much sifting, became the first few songs of the album. We also wanted to up the tempo. The last few albums have a neat little mantra or repetitive theme. If I was forced to find something like that in ''9'', I guess it would be 'biography' or 'observation' - a lot of the lyrics seem to focus on single people's lives, or the lives of small moments or small things when you zoom real close up and they reveal something deeper."

Critical reception

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional publications, ''9'' received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...

score of 72 based on six reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Rhys Buchanan from ''

NME ''New Musical Express'' (''NME'') is a British music, film, gaming, and culture website and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a 'rock inkie', the NME would become a magazine that ended up as a f ...

'' said "The band that keeps on giving, having pushed their self-proclaimed "polished psych-pop" to its outer reaches, reinvent themselves yet again." James Di Fabrizio from ''

Rolling Stone Australia ''Rolling Stone'' Australia is the Australian edition of the United States' ''Rolling Stone'' magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture, published monthly. The Australian version of ''Rolling Stone'' was initially published in 197 ...

'' said "At ''9''s best, it's an exhilarating ride through multiple ideas all being born at once. While it will never be Pond's most focused record, it's arguably more interesting to hear the band push forward into new territory than rehash well-trodden ideas."

Track listing

Personnel

Pond * Nick Allbrook – lead vocals, synthesizer,

production Production may refer to: Economics and business * Production (economics) * Production, the act of manufacturing goods * Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services) * Production as a stati ...

– vocals, bass, drums, guitar, synthesizer, production, mixing * Shiny Joe Ryan – guitar, synthesizer, production * Jamie Terry – production * James Ireland – keyboards, programming, production, mixing Additional personnel * David Ives – mastering * Maud Nadal – additional vocals on "Song for Agnes" * Jesse Kotansky – strings on "Song for Agnes", "Take Me Avalon I'm Young", "Gold Cup / Plastic Soul" and "Toast" * Christian Ruggiero – saxophone on "Song for Agnes" and "Human Touch" * Amaya Courtis – additional vocals on "Take Me Avalon I'm Young" and "Rambo" * Laurel – additional vocals on "Czech Locomotive" * Evelyn Ida Morris – piano on "Gold Cup / Plastic Soul" * Brod Madden-Scott – live instrumental engineering on "America's Cup", "Czech Locomotive" and "Toast" * Cowboy John – vocals on "Hang a Cross On Me" * Braulio Amado – artwork and layout

Charts

Release history

References

{{Authority control 2021 albums Pond (Australian band) albums