Dead Pony
Eat My Dust EP
Smashing together Anna Shields indie, pop, and grunge and Blair Crichton’s metal and rock influences, Glasgow’s Dead Pony have spent time crafting a dynamic and energetic riff-injected and industrial electronic mash up that buzzes and punches.
The pair have been making music since college, but under the Dead Pony moniker since 2020 and officially hitting my radar through a recommendation. That’s why I’m writing about this EP now when they released it in May. Now, as everyone knows, the last thing I enjoy is a recommendation. Nothing makes me delay listing to a band or reading a book than someone telling me I’d love it. Except when it comes up in the middle of a deep conversation about music with one the industry’s craftsmen.
That’s why Eat My Dust got it’s first play. Come on, ‘What If?’. Impress me. An atmospheric start. A gentle build and a thick detailed coming-to-a-head. Not bad, but this is a sub-two-minute prelude to where things really kick off, because ‘Eat My Dust!’ has a rush of riffs, urgency in the beat, and rapid electronic flickers. The high intensity soundscape is almost relentless, with just eight bars of rest in the middle.
Watch Dead Pony – ‘Eat My Dust!’.
The melodic vocal line and chugging guitars of ‘Freak Like Me’ make a great contrast, the smooth and the jagged combining into a big noisy chorus. The song is an outsider anthem and I’m sure I detect some wit in the distorted reflections of some famous pop lyrics. We’re quickly onto the racing ‘Fury’, which has fantastic gnarly moments in the pitch bends.
There’s a change of pace for ‘Boom!’, which has a moody sway to the beat and ‘Lost Inside of Me’ has the feel of the theme song for a dark crime drama in it’s opening bars, before notching up into an anthemic with it’s snare beat on the 4th and 7th beats. There’s a dark breakdown towards the end and plenty of chorus to go around.
There’s definitely a nu-metal nostalgia here, but there’s no attempt to purely recreate the sounds of that era, just a thick influence as we rush past what looked like being a grunge revival into a noughties-driven new wave of metal-infused music. If it’s going to bring records like this, I’m all in.
Watch Dead Pony – ‘Freak Like Me’.
Written by Fenton on
