Los Angeles band Drag Talk have announced their debut album, ‘Drink The Ocean’, out October 30 via MNRK Heavy. The first taste is ‘Pony Up’, a hazy, guitar-heavy new single arriving with a video today.

Drag Talk have been building toward a full-length for a while now. After the ‘Dogs’ EP in 2022 and ‘Rosy Crown’ two years later, the five-piece return with ‘Drink The Ocean’, a record that takes the shoegaze and ’90s alternative rock running through their earlier material and opens it up considerably. ‘Pony Up’ is a good place to start. Guitars blur around a slow-moving bassline while Jutty Taylor’s vocal seems to drift somewhere between the song and whatever is happening underneath it. There’s plenty of weight to the recording, but it never feels particularly interested in becoming straightforward heavy rock. The band’s explanation of the song is considerably stranger and more concise: “God exists and is as cruel, loving, insecure and indifferent as you or I.”

There’s another meaning hiding in the title. Gambling imagery turns up repeatedly across ‘Drink The Ocean’, and Taylor uses “pony up” in its simplest sense: the moment has arrived when somebody has to pay.

Drag Talk began in 2021 out of friendships that already went back years. Guitarist Ross O’Carroll, Taylor and drummer Hayden Scott had played together before, while Taylor and Scott also spent years performing with Swedish rock band Ghost. Guitarists Matt Ripp Bennett and O’Carroll knew each other from school in Hawaii, while Bennett and Neil Popkin previously played together in War Tapes.

The record reaches back toward Swervedriver, The Verve and The Jesus and Mary Chain in places, but Drag Talk aren’t particularly strict about the boundaries. Dream pop, psychedelia and bits of classic rock all turn up, usually filtered through Taylor’s somewhat sideways way of writing.

“I feel like we’re hardcore punk dudes who love Oasis,” O’Carroll says.

The songs themselves grew out of a more difficult period. Taylor has spoken about using the record to process personal upheaval, with themes of injustice, femininity, spirituality and loss appearing throughout. Even ‘Drink The Ocean’ can be read several ways: as a dare, an impossible task, or simply the feeling of throwing yourself completely into something without knowing where it ends.

“It’s an impossible task but you can spend your life trying,” Taylor says. “It might be fun.”

There are a couple of unexpected guests too. Brendan O’Brien plays Hammond organ on the title track, while Olivia Morreale, another musician associated with Ghost’s live band, contributes backing vocals to ‘Welcome to the Aeon’.

Headline photo: Ebru Yildiz

Drag Talk Instagram