Pond

MGMT's James Richardson popped out for the last song Pond played on American soil this year, and the loudest one they played all night. The psych rockers from Western Australia closed out the North American leg of their Terrestrials Tour with MC5's "Kick Out the Jams," which they’d played just once before: on April 28, 2012, at The Bakery in Perth. Fourteen years and nine thousand miles later, Pond reprised that ode to the originators of hard work at The Bellwether, on a Tuesday night just west of downtown L.A.

The Richardson sit-in wasn't the tour's only reunion. Six nights earlier, at Mohawk in Austin, Kevin Parker — who drummed with Pond from 2009 through 2011 — came out for the final song of the night to play "Makeout Party Girls," before moving on to Dallas for Tame Impala’s tour. That track came from the catalog of Mink Mussel Creek, the Perth outfit that predates both Pond and Tame Impala as anyone outside Western Australia would recognize them, with Parker on drums alongside Nick Allbrook and Shiny Joe Ryan.

Parker didn't make the trip to L.A., and after Pond’s 2026 North American finale, it's hard to argue the band needed him to.

For one, Allbrook, brought plenty of energy to share, and did so with dives into the crowd throughout the show. After solid opening sets by Tommy Newport and Josh Da Costa, and following Pond’s own opener of “Skyworks,” the band’s lead singer took his first leap during "Casuarina,” then again on "Daisy," and once more during "Terrestrials" to open the encore.

"America's Cup" landed fourth, and may be the most biographical of Pond’s roots. Allbrook has described the song as a story about the band’s hometown of Fremantle before the famous sailing competition gentrified the place. Beneath the funk of it all, the song’s themes hit with sneaky precision in a city that’s well-acquainted with the promise and perils of gentrification.

"Whatever Happened to the Million Head Collide" returned to the rotation in L.A., after a five-year gap that the band had broken in Austin the week before. Later in the set, "Paint Me Silver" still carried the lushest production in the catalog, albeit without contest from the more straightforward New Wave-y punk of 2026’s Terrestrials. That track, still Pond’s most streamed, hailed from 2017's The Weather, which the band co-produced with Parker at his home studio in Perth.

"Giant Tortoise" got the headbanging going, with a little moshing, courtesy of Ryan's crunchy guitar. Drums changed hands over the course of the night between James Ireland and Jay Watson, who also tours with Tame Impala and records on his own as GUM. That kind of positional fluidity is crucial to the architecture of the band, now 11 albums deep, with Terrestrials earning honors from Rolling Stone AU/NZ as one of the best Australian records of the year.

Anyone wanting to catch Pond again before the year ends will have to get down to Australia. They play Freo Social in Fremantle on December 5 with Automatic, then The Triffid in Brisbane on the 17th, Northcote Theatre in Melbourne on the 18th, and Sydney's Metro Theatre on the 19th.