Albums of the Year 2024 - Number 97

Pond are one of the most versatile, inquisitive, and accomplished bands of the psychedelic rock vanguard.

The last four Pond albums have been showcases of tidiness and brevity, 10 ideas always tucked into 40 minutes or so. But on Stung!, they gleefully, madly, and wilfully lean into double-LP largesse, tapping the spirit of Tusk and Sign ‘O’ the Times by funnelling 14 songs into the most unfettered and splendid hour of their recording career.

Stung! delivers some of Pond’s most glorious rock songs ever and also some of their least rock moments, all psychedelic drapery or funk vim. In that epic, as in Stung! at large, Allbrook speaks to our collective modern paradox of being disappointed in or even disconsolate over a world that we know more about than any prior generation but also being in awe of it and (sometimes) each other, too.

There are so many reasons to cry and so many reasons to marvel. Can’t they all, Pond suggests with Stung!, be reasons to sing?