Skip to content
Interviews

Pond’s Nick Allbrook Envies Death Grips, Explains What Happens When Galaxies Collide

Pond's Nick Allbrook discusses his favorite things

In May, Nick Allbrook left Aussie psych gurus Tame Impala in May after five years with the group in order to focus on Pond, his own awesomely trippy musical project. The latter band’s fifth album, Hobo Rocket, continues Parker’s wining streak, with whirling opener “Whatever Happened To The Million Head Collide” and the anthemic “Xanman” and “O Dharma” as the dizzying peaks.

Shortly before Hobo Rocket‘s release, we spoke over the phone with the playful Allbrook about his admiration for Black Sabbath, peak psychedelic trips, and some of his other favorite things. 

The Love Below
“I listen to [Andre 3000‘s] The Love Below side of OutKast‘s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below album between one and 50 times a week. The album is long, dense, and wildly sporadic while somehow being perfectly cohesive. It tells a story the whole way through so you can get stuck in it like a novel. It is simultaneously fucking hilarious and also deep. Musically it has funky wailing guitar, but it’s also danceable and the lyrics are full of fucked-up poetry. The Love Below has got everything I could ever want from an album.”

Cliff Diving
“Going to South Beach in Fremantle [in Australia] and jumping off the rocks into the water is pretty special. People from other parts of the world would not believe how quiet it can be if they saw the beach. It’s so beautiful that it feels like it should be packed with tourists, but it isn’t.”

Death Grips
“It fucking kills me that I haven’t seen them perform, but I really want to. I would love to take cues from their live show. Their aggression and energy is so much more pure than I could ever hope to achieve. I’m so much more confused and self-aware, that I don’t think I could ever access their level of anger.”

Black Sabbath
“Black Sabbath is one of those clichés that is a cliché for a reason. People in my position might be tentative to flaunt that sort of thing, but it’s classic rock because they themselves are fucking classic. The energy that grew between them in the room is better than any drugs that they may have been doing.”

Kurt Vonnegut Novels
Kurt Vonnegut is consistently inspirational. He seems to look at the world, history, and the human condition not even sideways, but more skewed. I can’t even begin to put a name on the angle he looks at the world from, but it’s pretty inspiring to see the world of viewed from such a bizarre and refreshing outside-of-the-box angle.”

Psychedelic Experiences
“I almost fell out of a tree once. I got slapped around the face by what I still think was some kind of thing coming through a little peephole into an alternate truth. It must have been some alternate galaxy in a mental, non-physical reality. [The galaxies] interact and are exactly the same regardless of time and space and everything. I almost fell out of a tree because of that, so that was pretty cool.”