White noise. Information overload. The inescapable sense that your voice is being lost in the crowd. For rising Scottish stars Dead Pony, the realisation that keeping heads above water in a soul-suckingly oversaturated modern music industry was stopping them from chasing the sort of singular sounds that had led here in the first place was a moment to pump brakes and take stock. They’d done what they were told. They’d tried to fit in. And all they’d gotten in return was dull-eyed apathy and shitty broken promises. So why keep flogging the dead horse of other people’s expectations? Why not bet on themselves with a debut album that’s all about standing out?!
“As a band, we’ve experienced an awful lot of being ignored,” grins towering guitarist and lead composer Blair Crichton. “We really don’t like that. So we set about making a debut LP so good that people had to pay attention. It’s a record that literally dares people to ‘Ignore THIS...’”
Across 16 shapeshifting tracks, IGNORE THIS does just that. Written, recorded and produced entirely by Blair and his bandmates Anna Shields (vocals), Liam Adams (bass) and Euan Lyons (drums), its combination of the cutting edge synth-rock of bands like WARGASM or Vukovi and the old-school legends like The Prodigy and Queens Of The Stone Age grabs the breath from your lungs and refuses to let go. Like Queens’ 2002 classic Songs For The Deaf, too, there’s a mixtape quality to the sprawling collection. Rather than flicking through stations in the radio, it’s more like digging into a stack of old VHS tapes: with the imagery teased on advance singles like MK Nothing (brainwashed assassins), MANA (zombie apocalypse), COBRA (an invasion of brain-dead bodysnatchers) and About Love (coming-of-age romance) barely hinting at what’s to follow.
“It’s about making music that appeals to people like us,” explains Anna, emboldened by the confidence of experiences like performing on the massive main stage of Glasgow’s TRNSMT festival and selling-out their first UK headline tour. “A lot of things have changed for us over the last few years, but it’s arguably even more powerful seeing how we’ve stayed the same. That’s solidified my understanding of who our fans are: people who like good music, who aren’t in too much of a hurry to pigeonhole bands into categories, who don’t give a fuck about following trends. When I look into the crowd at our shows, I see people who remind me of myself as a teenager. Those are the people this music is for: the misfits who struggle to fit in anywhere else…”