by Aly Muilenburg (@purity0lympics)
It’s a beautiful thing to watch a band continually home in on mastering a particular sound. While it certainly takes artistic courage to leap into the great unknown with a sudden left turn, I would argue that it can be more difficult to improve upon an already strong foundation. On their new EP, Norwegian quartet Pom Poko has done just that.
From their prolific beginnings in the mid-2010s, releasing a string of eight singles before their 2019 debut Birthday, Pom Poko has been on the hunt for the perfect balance between noise and pop. The members’ roots in jazz (all four studied at Trondheim Music Conservatory) hardly show, outside of perhaps their instrumental and melodic proficiency. Instead, they favor feedback-laden bursts of guitar and caffeinated, sugary hooks. Through sheer force of creativity, Pom Poko overwhelms the “post-punk” box it would be easy to force them into.
Almost immediately, the band continued to release more music. The subsequent songs leading up to 2021’s Cheater embraced their more idiosyncratic impulses without forgetting the good songwriting that made them stand out in the first place. In an interview with Ja Ja Ja Music, they described their approach as “want[ing] to keep on making good music and try not to repeat ourselves too much.” Cheater is more focused and noisier than anything they’d made previously.
This brings us to This Is Our House, Pom Poko’s latest work of frenzied art. The band drew from their entire history to pick the tracks that make up the EP. It’s nearly impossible to tell which songs are new and which are old — all four are whipped together into a whirlwind of pounding noise and glassy beauty. “Time” is a fantastic, shrill song, crescendoing towards a punchy ending (the shouts of “TIME!” threaten to knock me out of my chair every time). Sort-of title track “Our House” lives in the space between cacophonous instrumentals and floaty choruses.
The EP’s closing track “Sonatina” feels closest to what Pom Poko called “a peek into the future for us.” Sounding like it was summoned from a long-lost chamber pop record, it’s easily one of the prettiest songs in the band’s discography. If they’re drifting in this direction going forward, Pom Poko has already proven themselves more than capable of expanding their usual palette.
It’s hard not to want more after being gifted with a fulfilling yet deliberately interstitial release like This Is Our House. Pom Poko has managed to simultaneously bolster and contract our expectations for whatever might come next, regardless of where they find themselves.