Australia’s Pond Proves Too Big to Contain at Chicago’s Metro
By Shawna O’Hara, Editor – Photo by James Scully
Some bands fill a room; others seem determined to test the sound barrier.
When Australian psych-rock veterans Pond took the stage at Chicago’s Metro Thursday night, the five-piece arrived with a sound and personality that felt bigger than the room. It wasn’t just their sheer volume, although from the opening notes, Pond was extraordinarily loud. It was the force with which the packed house answered them. For just over an hour, the energy transferred between stage and floor, each side daring the other to get a little bigger and a little louder.
Chicago’s own Daisychain opened the night with a tight, roughly 30-minute set that offered an appropriately kaleidoscopic introduction to what would follow. Their psychedelia is difficult to pin to one musical era. At different times, bluesy heaviness gave way to bass-forward melodies reminiscent of the Beatles, while flashes of ‘90s alternative rock brought Hole and Kim Gordon to mind. Elsewhere, the band sounded almost beachy and nostalgic, its ‘60s sensibility showing through without turning the set into an exercise in revivalism.
There was little banter, beyond acknowledging their Chicago roots, but Daisychain didn’t need much of it. The band was playful and visibly enjoying itself, allowing its chemistry to do much of the talking. Later, members appeared among the crowd to watch Pond, a fitting image for a bill that felt less like an arbitrary pairing of opener and headliner than two different approaches to psychedelic rock sharing the same room.
Pond began its set shortly after 9 p.m. with “Skyworks,” from the band’s newly released 11th album, Terrestrials. If that record was conceived around a stylistic idea the band has described as “goths at the pub,” the live translation at Metro was considerably harder to categorize. Pond could be psychedelic, post-punk, groove-heavy, and at times remarkably hard within the same set, fluidly shifting between those identities at any given moment.
That may be what makes Pond most impressive today. Psychedelia remains unmistakably embedded in the band’s DNA, but nothing about its sound feels trapped in the period that first produced it. Older favorites including “Sweep Me Off My Feet,” “Daisy” and “Paint Me Silver” sat comfortably beside new material from Terrestrials, with the older songs drawing particularly enormous responses from the crowd. Rather than dividing the night into old Pond and new Pond, the set demonstrated just how naturally the band represents each iteration of itself.
The guitars were a driving force, but much of the scale came from elsewhere. Synths and keys frequently pushed to the front of the mix, sometimes becoming the dominant sound and giving the harder guitar passages an atmospheric counterweight. Underneath it all was an insistent groove. Even as the band moved into its heaviest, almost psych-punk territory, Pond remained an extraordinarily difficult band to stand still for.
Frontman Nick Allbrook was similarly difficult to ignore.
There is something vaguely Beck-like about Allbrook’s charisma: wiry, eccentric, and seemingly uninterested in performing the role of a conventional rock frontman. He didn’t spend the entire night pacing every inch of the stage, yet somehow seemed perpetually animated. Within the opening stretch of the show, he had already ventured into the crowd. Over the course of the night, he went from collapsing onto the stage floor to enthusiastically jamming face-to-face with his bandmates.
His voice could be equally flexible. Brief growls occasionally suggested the theatrical power of Freddie Mercury and, more frequently, the sensual swagger of fellow Australian frontman, the late Michael Hutchence, before Allbrook would slip easily back into his own register.
“How are ya, ya alright?” he greeted the crowd early in the night. “Thanks for coming, ya bunch of legends!”
The affection was mutual.
A shout of “We love you!” eventually came from somewhere deep in the room. The crowd was hard to characterize by any obvious demographic: ages varied widely, and shirts ranged from Kim Gordon to Slayer. One fan had traveled from Seattle and had already seen Pond more than once. What united the room was considerably easier to identify. This was a loyal audience, packed tightly together and deeply familiar with a band whose catalog now stretches across nearly two decades.
Before launching into “Daisy,” Allbrook quipped about Australia and the state of the world: “Shit’s on fire, still gotta dance!” He told the crowd he hoped the song might remind them of theirs before the band slipped into the song. The sentiment felt equally applicable to Pond itself: the band never lost sight of the groove.
Even Chicago’s favorite rite of passage got its moment, with the band joking between songs about having experienced Malört.
By the set’s end, the relationship between Pond and the crowd had become reciprocal. After a remarkably brief disappearance from the stage around 10:10 p.m., the band returned for “Don’t Look at the Sun or You’ll Go Blind” with an energy that somehow seemed renewed rather than depleted. The psychedelic groove expanded through the room, and the packed floor began moving almost as a single organism; less like the audience at a traditional rock show than a crowd caught somewhere between a rave and a trance.
Pond spent the night demonstrating that psychedelic rock can be loud, contemporary, strange, danceable, and occasionally ferocious without abandoning what made the genre its own thing in the first place. Thursday night’s show demonstrated exactly that. Pond sounded enormous. Metro’s crowd answered in kind.
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Gallery:
Tour Dates:
Aug 29, 2026 – Fine Line – Minneapolis, MN
Sep 3, 2026 – The Showbox – Seattle, WA
Sep 7, 2026 – Revolution Hall – Portland, OR
Sep 12, 2026 – Gothic Theatre – Denver, CO
Sep 16, 2026 – Mohawk Outdoor – Austin, TX
Sep 18, 2026 – Studio at The Bomb Factory – Dallas, TX
Sep 22, 2026 – The Bellwether – Los Angeles, CA
Links:
Official: https://pond.band/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pondling
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ponderers