Some just pop the balloon, others untie the knot and apply pressure to let the air out slowly. Pony Girl's new album is an exercise in the latter kind of restraint.
Kicking off with the giddy title track — the consummate banger of their career, with a bridge that levels up the best moments of a band like Bombay Bicycle Club with Yolande Laroche's clarinet flourishes — the anticapitalist energy is immediately pulled back by "Highways." Pascal Huot fittingly sings only just above a whisper as they repeat the refrain, "Highways forming inside of my soul."
It isn't until the nihilistic anthem "I Believe in Nothing" that Pony Girl are back in their bodies as they ironically give themselves permission to detach beneath cyclical bursts of jagged guitar and swathes of distortion. But the remaining five tracks — the majority of the record — find them returning to dark mode, exercising the softer textures in their palette and even leaning into ambient instrumental territory on tracks like "Laura" and the found sounds of "Never Again."
Poised as a sister album to last year's Enny One Wil Love You, Laff It Off acts as a shadow self of the peaks and valleys the Ottawa-Hull band explored in 2022. In Jungian psychology, the shadow self represents the opposite of the persona we present to others; things about ourselves we repress or avoid acknowledging. So it's quite a feat that Pony Girl not only voiced this part of their psyche, but also managed to harness this depth into genre-blending accessibility to make some of their most meaningful and fun music yet.
(Paper Bag)Kicking off with the giddy title track — the consummate banger of their career, with a bridge that levels up the best moments of a band like Bombay Bicycle Club with Yolande Laroche's clarinet flourishes — the anticapitalist energy is immediately pulled back by "Highways." Pascal Huot fittingly sings only just above a whisper as they repeat the refrain, "Highways forming inside of my soul."
It isn't until the nihilistic anthem "I Believe in Nothing" that Pony Girl are back in their bodies as they ironically give themselves permission to detach beneath cyclical bursts of jagged guitar and swathes of distortion. But the remaining five tracks — the majority of the record — find them returning to dark mode, exercising the softer textures in their palette and even leaning into ambient instrumental territory on tracks like "Laura" and the found sounds of "Never Again."
Poised as a sister album to last year's Enny One Wil Love You, Laff It Off acts as a shadow self of the peaks and valleys the Ottawa-Hull band explored in 2022. In Jungian psychology, the shadow self represents the opposite of the persona we present to others; things about ourselves we repress or avoid acknowledging. So it's quite a feat that Pony Girl not only voiced this part of their psyche, but also managed to harness this depth into genre-blending accessibility to make some of their most meaningful and fun music yet.