New Young Pony Club - The Get Go

Overheard on Radio One’s Blue Room last week, NY Pony Club’s second single has almost sold out its thousand-copy run, but I thought it was worth writing about anyway. They’re an elusive band – a Google search brings up little more about them than a few websites selling the last copies of the single. I had to e-mail the artist who designed their record sleeve to find out where their website was hidden.

The Get Go sounds like Debbie Harry singing over a Frankie Knuckles tune played by Joy Division. It’s post-punk electroclash stuff but with a massive bass riff that rolls, unchanging, throughout the length of the tune. The sleazy, strip-club vocals are underpinned by sparse, glassy synths and a thin lead guitar riff that sounds like Bernard Sumner’s got his hands on it.

It’s released through Tirk records, a new imprint started by the people behind nineties British deep house label Nuphonic. Interviews with the label boss say that they’re planning to put out sounds that people will recognise from their old imprint but to bring in new stuff – post-punk sounds and experimental, krautrock grooves that better represent the stuff that is going on nowadays.

NY Pony Club’s sound is up-to-date in a retro way. Yeah, the influences are from the eighties, but this is different to Felix Da Housecat’s Prince-esque stuff and miles away from Bloc Party’s Cure tunes. This record’s rough and lo-fi, like Sleater-Kinney, but with a bigger groove – the tune is built around that massive bass line with the grating guitars and pop vocals building and building over it as it goes on.

It’s backed with the double A-side Jerk Me (which plays on their website as you log on), a funkier tune that sounds like a Madonna song remixed by Talking Heads. The two of them make a great package of retro sounds that are up-to-the-minute and pointing somewhere way ahead of their time.