DEAD PONY make themselves impossible not to watch with their raging debut album, 'Ignore This'. Read and listen with our latest Hype playlist cover feature.
Words: Ciaran Picker.
Photos: Derek Bremner.
The modern-day music business is a fickle beast. The reliance on algorithms makes it too easy to overlook acts who have something to say and, importantly, an innovative and ear-catching way of saying it. Enter Dead Pony, the snarling Glaswegian quartet who are coming for you. Yes, you.
Working away for the past five years, including support slots for CHVRCHES, Nelly Furtado covers, and a main stage set at last year's TRNSMT, they've had enough of being ignored. And with debut album 'Ignore This', they deliver body blow after body blow, pulling no punches.
Combine the tongue-in-cheek energy of pop-punk, breakdowns and structures of dark electronica, and the headbang-inducing melodies of nu-metal, and you get somewhere close to the hook-heavy hard rock feel of this record. It's always difficult to meld multiple cross-genre influences and still keep an identifiable and individual sound, but Dead Pony have got it on their first try.
Part of this comes from the band's total ownership of their music, with guitarist Blair Crichton not only lending his trademark riffs and licks to proceedings but also producing the complete project. "We're such control freaks," vocalist Anna Shields reveals. "No one outside of Dead Pony understands how I want this band to sound, so it is important that we can basically do what we want." Blair agrees, adding, "We had the option to have collabs and features, but a debut needs to be a standalone thing, no voice actors or anything, just Dead Pony."
"Voice actors?" you may ask. Well, as the album artwork might suggest – a selection of VHS tapes featuring images of the band and hiding easter eggs for the goodies within – there is something deeply cinematic about the album. Inspired by some of their favourite films, Dead Pony have crafted a record that gives the feeling of late-night channel-hopping, except in this case, there's something worth watching on every side.
