The past two years have been busy for Pond. The band has released two albums in that time – March 2012's Beard, Wives, Denim, and last August's Hobo Rocket. The band is constantly labelled against bigger brother Tame Impala, and hey, it makes sense, considering up until recently, three of Pond's members featured in the world-renowned group. That said, Perth has been extremely lucky to keep Pond to itself for the greater part of the band's lifespan. However, given the prolific nature of their musical output, it's no wonder fans from around the globe are finally starting to catch up and give what has been labelled a 'side-project' for so many years its own berth.

To Allbrook though, it doesn't really make a difference. Having enjoyed touring the world with Tame, it's now simply about making music and focusing on being a better person. “I want to make more time to call up the people I love and respect, and to not make excuses because there's something else I'd rather be doing or it's not the right time,” he muses, backstage at Southbound. “Parents, grandparents, old friends, people overseas... just making time for the people I love. And that leads on from my last year's resolution, which was to eliminate guilt from my life, to not do anything that makes me feel guilty and to not let people endlessly try to guilt me. So this is an extension on that, because if someone goes and you don't feel like you've done enough, there's nothing worse.”

For a while, Pond was the band that its members used simply to jam out and muck around. Each member is involved in multiple ventures; Allbrook himself, who's since quit touring with Tame, is involved with Mink Mussel Creek with Kevin Parker, and Allbrook/Avery with Pond's current drummer, Cam Avery. According to Allbrook, sometimes it can be difficult to keep up. “You just shit out songs and it just kind of gets randomly distributed into different bands; before you know it, you're playing a song from one of your bands in another. We figured out Hobo Rocket in one night, I'm pretty sure. It all just comes together. We all write our own stuff at home because there's a lot of hours we're not together. We chat and jam and debate as anyone else would, but we're definitely different as a band and as people since we first started. I always just imagined  doing a fun, MGMT-ish, Mighty Boosh-ish sort of thing – because I love The Mighty Boosh – and I just wanted to do just stupid, psychedelic stuff and just make albums in two days, which we did. It's all put together very quickly, but we're so far departed from where we started now in terms of our sound.” Since releasing Hobo Rocket, the band's focus has been on their next record, Man, It Feels Like Space Again. The latter record was actually being worked on prior to Hobo Rocket, so for the guys, the end product is highly anticipated. Allbrook feels like Man... is most certainly a record that was worth holding back on, if for nothing else, to epitomise the band's growth. “It (Man...) is kind of like all the things we've learnt since the beginning, put into one: The strange overdubbing process of the beginning like Psychedelic Mango and then the fiendish jamming in Hobo Rocket. We have a balance of danceable, weird-sounding jam tunes.”

The psych-rock specialists have spent the last few months playing around the country, at Falls Festival and Southbound, and now Perth Festival. The Perth scene still holds a special place in Allbrook's heart. “I think the most inspiring thing about the Perth scene is the beat-making side of things – James Island and Mei Saraswati, Savoir – that's world-inspiring stuff that I listen to on the tram all the time. I watch Doctopus and have a great party time and get pissed but I listen to Savoir and stuff at home on the iPod. It's great.” Allbrook thinks playing with Pond is starting to feel like playing in a band that's really gaining momentum: “I always used to feel super weird playing at home. It felt like everyone in the audience were just my friends. And I didn't want to act the fool and cut loose because it's just my mates looking at me on stage going 'What's he doing?' but now the people I don't know in the audience have outweighed my friends, so it just feels like anywhere else. Regardless of anything, we're having a good time and that's all we want to do.”