New Music: Pit Pony – At Dawn

To tie in with the release of their Dead Stars album, Newcastle quintet Pit Pony have dropped a video for opening track, the vibrant and vignette-filled At Dawn.

The band is a musical powerhouse here, with each member giving their all on At Dawn, showcasing both their versatility and also their often-visceral approach to music.

Just as the accompanying video features themes reflecting on the bleak beauty and deceptive impermanence of waterfronts in big cities, so does the song’s tale of personal change.

While the main body of the track focuses on the passionate vocals of Jackie Purver and the blistering sonic and soul-searching barrage of her bandmates, it’s bookended by two touching, folk-rock-inflected interludes. It shows that even though Dead Stars is a thrilling album, Pit Pony have more to offer us in the future.

Purver says about the single, “At Dawn is a reference to personal experience, it’s a storytelling song about being young and caught up in things you think will last forever and then they’re fleeting. I actually wrote it to look back on something that I was resentful about for a while and to make peace with it with a more mature viewpoint. Everything shapes us as we go.”

“The At Dawn name itself is a nod to my favourite film, Rebel Without A Cause, in which Plato (Sal Mineo) asks Jim (James Dean) whether he thinks the world will end at night time and he responds ‘Nuh uh, at dawn.’”

Dead Stars is out now, and can be picked up in vinyl and CD formats on Bandcamp. in vinyl and CD editions. To tie in with the album, the band tours the UK in April: head over to the quintet’s Facebook, Blue Sky, and Instagram socials for ticket and venue details.

Header photo by Nigel John