Pony

Pony – TV Baby (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 29:34 minutes | 360 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Take This To Heart

TV Baby, the debut LP from Toronto power-pop act PONY, feels like it’s programmed from a different era. Driven by vocalist/guitarist Sam Bielanski’s sharp vocal tones and flashy, driving rhythm, the band combines cheeky 1980s style with 1990s self-reliance and modern production sheen for an experience caught between worlds. It’s hooky and vibrant, but don’t mistake exuberance for extroversion. TV Baby is an album dedicated to the indoor cats, the introverts, and those who value their independence above anything else.

Bielanski, along with close friends Matty Morand (Pretty Matty) and Lucas Horne, have taken a piecemeal approach to worldbuilding here. They’ll take you to the band computer, where Sam’s frantically typing symptoms into a search bar into “WebMD,” where body horror meets sugar-rushed guitars. Next comes a thorny survey of the “Furniture,” fuzzy and scuff-marked, before letting you crash on the “Couch,” a pop-punk ode to discovering new parts of yourself while the world rolls past. When others are present in this internal monologue, like those hurt and driven to “Cry,” they’re greeted with the same maximalist pop-rock. In PONY’s gig economy, riffs beat out the rearview mirror. Saddle up alongside them and your joyride is guaranteed.
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Pony – Velveteen (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 34:50 minutes | 448 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock, Power Pop, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Take This To Heart

Amidst the isolation of the past 2+ years, PONY’s Sam Bielanski and their partner Matty Morand transformed themselves into songwriting machines. Thanks in part to their pandemic podcast project, 2 Much TV, which challenged themselves to write a new song every single week, they wrote over 100 new original songs – finding inspiration from hours of television, books, and self reflection, and constantly sharpening their songwriting tools with every new melody. The result is the band’s second full-length studio album, Velveteen, featuring some of their most vulnerable to-date – 10 new stories about deep connection or longing for it, and embracing true authenticity, all wrapped in easily consumable pop hooks and infectious melodies. “For me I have learned that we become our most authentic selves when we allow ourselves to be open and deeply affected by someone else” says Bielanski, reflecting on the songwriting process that also corresponded with a 9 month-long struggle with insomnia that also inspired the album’s title. “I listened to an audio book of the velveteen rabbit every night until I fell asleep. I became obsessed with the story but I never listened all the way through. The way I eventually interpreted the story was that it’s the love that we give and receive that makes us real or whole. The one chapter I found especially heart wrenching is when the velveteen rabbit is trying to hang with the real rabbits of the forest, and through comparison he realizes he isn’t as real as he thought he was. It was a good lesson for me even now because I’m constantly fighting the urge to compare myself to others. Your individual experiences make you who you are and nothing can change that. That’s what I thought, until I finally listened to the entirety of the story and found out that at the end of the book a fairy turns the velveteen rabbit into an actual rabbit and then I got really confused.” The songwriting process for this record was different from any other time PONY had recorded music in the past. Bielanski was stuck inside, had a bad neighbor, and was forced to write music in absolute silence. “I made a lot of the demos for this record on garageband on my phone, often singing into my headphone mic inside the closet so as to not disturb anyone. Once I was happy with the songs Matty would add their contributions until we felt the songs were nearly done. It was amazing to see how much the songs would change every time a new person was added into the mix. It wasn’t until we recorded them with [recording engineer] Alex Gamble that the songs truly came to life for me. I guess Alex was the fairy who made Velveteen real.”

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