Pony Girl announces upcoming album, Enny One Wil Love You with new single, “Age of Anxious”
Ottawa-Hull-based art pop collective Pony Girl announced their forthcoming LP, Enny One Wil Love You, which will be released on October 14, 2022, via Paper Bag Records.
To kick off the announcement, the five-piece ensemble shared the record’s first single and video for “Age of Anxious.” The track explores themes of isolation in the digital age through dark comic vignettes & absurdist situations. It’s a sitcom for rats with a side of existential dread.
“Age of Anxious’ is a breakup song, but not for a lover. It’s about longing for an idealized past without questioning the truth about our own recollection. Technology is partly to blame, such as the constant listener of our phones. We’re living with a double-edged sword of innovation and misinformation at our fingertips. Both tech and the song feel deceptively romantic, a musical illusion aided greatly by Joseph Shabason’s nostalgic sax. Even though the past was never better, we think it was. How can we want something back that we’ve never had?
The song is inspired by farsickness and selective memory. The rise of populist movements has shown that we long for idealized versions of the past. Re-writings of history that omit the truth and conveniently support their ideologies. Through this lens we explore the breakup song.”
The video for “Age of Anxious” takes the viewer through a fabricated dollhouse we might all feel trapped inside, scrolling through our phones, searching for love, and struggling to free ourselves from technology.
Director Brittany Delgaty said:
“The last three years have felt as though we live more of our lives on the internet than we do outside of it. Especially in the peak of the quarantine, our perception of reality became confused and warped. We’ve seen riots, wars, political controversies all scroll past in our Instagram feeds…and sometimes it feels difficult to care about any of it.
This video does not follow a traditional story structure – while some scenes in the video are connected, many of them only exist to complement lyrics in the song or incorporate elements from the visual identity of the Enny One Wil Love You album.
The video was shot with limited camera movement, using zooms and symmetrical framing to give it a slightly retro and claustrophobic feel. Most scenes were shot against flat coloured backgrounds with pops of complementing colour integrated either through the lighting or in the set design. Off-speed frame rates were also used for lip syncing scenes to increase the surreal feeling for the viewer.”
Enny One Wil Love You holds a mirror to our negative cycles for an album that’s as alluring as self-sabotage. Don’t let the title from a childhood painting fool you. Perpetual wartime, teenage temptations, false idols—we’re always crashing the same car in some form or another. So did the band, quite literally, in the lead-up to the album release. Pony Girl has braved much together, and their music is stronger for it.