Upcoming Releases

There’s gasoline in the water. Tom Petty distorts through a car stereo. Betrayal, broken limbs, half-naked bodies launching themselves from the rail of the Ledyard Bridge into the Connecticut River.

There’s a price to pay for letting go of what’s real on “Endless Summer,” the opening track of Matt Pond PA’s Permanent Change Part 1—“Young liars turn into old liars, turn into dust and blow away.”

Walking the dog, drowsing at the lake, ordering a seltzer in a dive bar, being unable to sleep, lying on the living-room floor, feeling awkward, feeling alone, feeling love. Small moments, minor tragedies, humble victories, routine annoyances. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, the downtime, the moments in between. 

“The Stars Below” lingers in that suspended space between jumping and impact—“The silence, the silence, the silence, until the sound of the splash.”

Matt Pond’s new album, often feels like a one-on-one conversation, an intimate contemplation of his own consciousness and daily existence against a larger backdrop of thoughts about life and death, telling stories and telling truths, being solitary and being together. 

When it comes to the brilliant mediocrity of Onteora Lake, there’s nowhere else to be: “Walking slow in the parking-lot dust cloud, you and your sister troubled twins. It’s a movie I believe in. I scored a role in it.”

Pond is known for describing landscapes—physical and emotional—with closely observed details, creating an often expansive atmosphere that resonates with listeners because of the universal feelings it draws up and together like a twister, spinning into a glorious oblivion.

“Learn How to Lose” turns the whole thing into a wager: If you’re going to spend your life touring and trying to reach people through music, “You gotta learn how to lose, you gotta try and be better at digging your own grave.”

Sometimes it’s doubt, other times resignation, but it’s always a party —“Find it hard to believe out of anyone you’d choose to waste time with me.”

And “Soda Gun” feels like stepping out of a hole in the wall and into a strange deep-woods bash: “We used to swim in gasoline, lower our shoulders and run right into trees.” Even when it’s nearly over—maybe especially then. In those last few seconds before everything turns off: “Always late for the sky. Maybe this is how we say our goodbyes.”

“To me, this album is like an endless, fading summer afternoon,” Pond says. “It’s about embracing imperfection and being able, for one brief moment, to let go of worry. It’s about looking back on mistakes with pride. It’s about the way life can feel like a constant audition, and then the attempt to finally let that idea fall away.” 

He envisions it as the first of two or three volumes of Permanent Change, a work he wants to be “sprawling and wild.

From the band’s beginnings in Philadelphia to their current home in the Hudson Valley—through 15 albums (among them Emblems, Several Arrows Later, The Dark Leaves, The State of Gold, and, most recently, The Ballad of the Natural Lines), countless EPs, and beloved songs like “Measure 3,” “New Hampshire,” “Lily Two,” “Halloween,” “Brooklyn Stars,” “Specks,” and “Love to Get Used”—Matt Pond PA has remained a living, breathing organism, permanently changing.