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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.
Drawing inspiration from a zombie apocalypse, body-snatching, or a troop of brainwashed super-soldiers, much of this album is just massive. Anna’s soaring vocals go toe-to-toe with Blair’s deafening guitar lines. The rhythm section – bassist Liam Adams and drummer Euan Lyons – blast their way through the LP, with throbbing basslines and bombastic drumming driving the record forward and keeping the intensity up, especially through the insane three-song run of ‘IGNORE THIS’, ‘MK Nothing’, and ‘AWOL’.
The moments that reverberate around like a T-Rex stomping toward a truck in Jurassic Park are complemented by shorter tracks that act as an ad break, letting you catch your breath before another gripping fight scene. Opening track ‘the antagonist is ignorance’, which acts as a foreboding prologue for the ensuing onslaught, sees Blair take over main vocals for the first time in the last five years, evidence that Dead Pony are constantly evolving and inventing.
The danger with having such vivid imaginations, though, is that there are almost too many ideas to pick from. Luckily, the band’s close friendship means they are able to be totally honest with each other. “Most ideas I bring to the band Anna tells me are ‘fucking shite’, so I’ve given up now,” Blair grins. “No! That doesn’t happen!” Anna laughs, “I’m just not gonna sing a song I don’t like; it goes back to wanting the band to sound a certain way; we just want to put out our best stuff.”
“Most ideas I bring to the band Anna tells me are ‘fucking shite’, so I’ve given up now”
Blair Crichton
The interaction between Blair and Anna here, but also between all four band members in their high-intensity and high-quality live shows, are stronger than ever after the rigid writing process that resulted in this first-class debut. Stuck in the Scottish Highlands for fourteen days straight, writing a song a day, it took everything the band had to keep plugging away at the project. What was a pretty draining experience, though, added resilience to both the band and the LP.
“It’s sort of impossible to not play our songs huge and energetic, but towards the end we did have to make a conscious effort to keep the energy up,” Anna remembers. Being a band at the relative start of their career, though, the time pressure meant that they didn’t really have a choice. “Talking to other bands about it, I think we did it in a pretty unconventional way,” Anna remarks. “We just had to be super regimented because we knew we didn’t have time to mess around.”
The band didn’t settle for the first recording, though, with Blair spending days mixing, layering, and re-recording guitar lines to create the exact sound to fit. In many ways, not settling is Dead Pony’s key characteristic. The arena-worthy songwriting ability that was evident on early releases like ‘Sharp Tongues’ or ‘Sex Rich’ has morphed into something sonically more venomous and lyrically more vulnerable.
The subject matter of ‘Ignore This’ holds glimmers of impish charm in songs like ‘X-Rated’, but also has introspection sprinkled throughout, with references to body image, questioning your personality, or feeling like a social pariah, all making an appearance.
Anna opens up about this deep dive into more personal topics: “In the past, I would write lyrics that I thought were cool or that I could sing well. But with ‘Ignore This’, we put so much of ourselves into it; it’s emotional and personal because it’s about what’s inspired me and what’s got us this far.”
It’s evident from chatting to the band that the self-assured swagger that exudes from them is a comparatively new addition to proceedings, matching the stage persona that Anna inhabits, for example, stalking through and staring down the crowd during fan favourite ’23, Never Me’. Growing up as emo kids – or a metal kid, in Blair’s case – definitely had its effects on the band, something which their gaining a foothold in the industry is helping to eradicate.
“Because we grew up as outcasts, a bit freaky, we spent so long trying to be cool, to do what everyone else was doing because we thought it was embarrassing to be an emo band,” Anna admits. “Now though, that shame just isn’t there anymore – we know what we want and exactly how we’re gonna get it.” From the kids on the barrier screaming lyrics back to their heroes, Dead Pony now get to be that band for the next generation of punks and rockers, which is pretty damn cool in itself.
Even cooler, though, is that the band aren’t taking themselves too seriously. Sure, they have ambition by the bucketful, but that doesn’t prevent them from throwing in the odd curveball, with the frankly unhinged closing track ‘Motor City Mad Man’ being a case in point. To set the scene: Blair inhabits the character of a Deep South redneck who breaks into the studio and unleashes a pretty self-serving monologue. Yes, it’s as mental as it sounds.
At the mere mention of the title, Blair bursts into hysterics. “I wrote that drunk about two years ago! It was just a band joke at first, then it was gonna be a hidden track, but we went, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it!’ – but it’s actually a really well-written song. I stand by it!” Given the heavy influence film has on the album, it actually fits pretty perfectly and points to a band chock full of personality and deeply in love with the music they’re making.
“Because we grew up as outcasts, a bit freaky, we spent so long trying to be cool”
Anna Shields
What they’re doing is clearly working wonders, with the band winning the 2023 Scottish Music Awards Live Spotlight Award, although Blair and Anna shrug this off with the cucumber-esque coolness you’d expect from a band at the top of their game; Blair candidly states, “I’ve thought we were the best band in the world for the last five years!”
Those five years have been totally transformational for Dead Pony, with their effervescent talent now seeing them take on not only the ‘mainstream’ but also delve into the dark magic of the metal show. The band were recently announced for Reading & Leeds, usually a pretty decent gauge of acts who will hit the big time soon (and a ‘bucket list moment’ for the band). Blair and Anna are more excited, though, for their tours with screamo icons The Blackout and punk upstarts Kid Kapichi. The pinnacle, though, is a summer trip out to Czechia for Rock For People, with their name up in lights next to metal royalty Corey Taylor and Bring Me The Horizon.
It comes as a welcome addition to an already packed live schedule but also an unexpected one for Anna: ‘As a female-fronted band, we never thought it would happen. We thought we’d just keep being forced into pop or indie lineups. But now we’ve got Rock For People, 2000trees too; it’s pretty cool!’
‘Ignore This’ and the subsequent touring frenzy are only disc one in this multi-series story for Dead Pony, though, with Anna teasing that the band “are ready to get back in the studio in a big way.” But don’t expect anything too soon, with the gang always waiting until the time is right to create and release new music.
“Before this album was written,” Blair says, “I’d already mapped it all out and knew how I wanted it to flow,” something that can’t be rushed. Anna adds, “People ask us ‘why now?’ and the honest answer is it just felt right. We’ve got a really solid and dedicated fanbase, and there was just good juju about it!”
It’s hard to think of any band out there right now that are doing it like Dead Pony, especially on their first album. In letting their true selves shine through, both personally and musically, they’ve created a blockbuster of a record which will send their already box office live show completely off the charts. Malevolent, magical, and more than a bit mad, Dead Pony have made themselves impossible to ignore. ■
Dead Pony’s debut album ‘Ignore This’ is out 5th April. Follow Dork’s Hype Spotify playlist here.
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