TV Baby PONY

• 1 Chokecherry 02:45
• 2 WebMD 02:17
• 3 By the Way 03:01
• 4 Furniture 02:32
• 5 Couch 02:31
• 6 My Room 02:19
• 7 Sometime Later 03:27
• 8 Cry 03:15
• 9 Sunny D 03:48
• 10 Swore 03:34
• Total Runtime 29:29

Info for TV Baby

V Baby, the debut album 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.

PONY

PONY
began in 2014 as an idea hatched by singer/guitarist Sam Bielanski and a friend in her Toronto bedroom. "We were both dating dudes in the same shitty band at the time" she says, "and they were really shitty dudes, so we started writing songs about how our boyfriends sucked and eventually that turned into us starting band." As the pair wrote more songs they began recruiting additional members to round out the line up and after a few early changes settled on a four piece arrangement of Bielanski, bass player Eva Link, drummer Matt Sandrin and guitarist Stephen Giroux.

The band recorded an EP and started playing shows in Toronto, rapidly attracting attention as they refined their sound - a strain of punk-inflected guitar pop that sits in a lineage with 80s UK acts like Talulah Gosh and the Dolly Mixture, 90s groups like The Breeders and Veruca Salt, and their Canadian powerpop forebears Cub - and began appearing on bills with their eventual Buzz Records labelmates Casper Skulls and Greys, as well as acts like Colleen Green, the Coathangers, Chastity Belt and Nicole Dollanganger in 2016. In the fall of that year the band returned to the studio to record the singles, "DIY" and "Alone Tonight," that will make up their first release on Buzz records, a 7 inch due out in the spring.

PONY are currently plotting a trip to SXSW, preparing for upcoming winter and spring tours, and working on their debut EP for Buzz, which they expect to release in the fall of 2017. For her part Bielanski is excited about what the future holds for her and her bandmates, and despite the band's almost accidental origins, has a clear vision of what PONY means to her.

"I wanna see the world with my three best friends, but that’s not all of it," she says. "A few times younger girls have come up to me at our shows and said “that was really cool, what you did, I’ve always wanted to do something like that” and it’s just like then go, go and do it! Pick up a guitar and make some noise and scream about your feelings, and just do it. That’s the goal of the band to me, to show people, primarily women who maybe haven’t been exposed to enough other women playing music, that it’s not easy by any means but its definitely attainable. If it's something that you want to do then you can fucking do it and you don’t have to give a shit about if you’re cool or if dudes are going to be condescending or whatever, you can just make some noise with your friends."

This album contains no booklet.