New Young Pony Club EP [Modular Interscope]

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Rating: 7.0

In the same spirit as Brazil’s CCS, British indie-electronic quintet New Young Pony Club is silly, irresistible fun. The clipped guitar chords, synth melodies and irresistible beats of their single “Ice Cream” demand booty shaking as much as its goofy, sexual metaphors (“drink me like a licker, come and dip your dipper”) make for the perfect, sassy sing-along. It’s no wonder the single sold out in the UK in three days and is no doubt destined for the sweaty, after-midnight throb of many nights to come. Their self-titled EP even includes the video for “Ice Cream”, in which the band’s three female members bop coyly atop a giant globe of rainbow-colored licorice (“I can make you ice cream, we can be a sweet team”), cat-sized dollops of whipped cream form a carousel around the drummer, and mounds of pink cotton candy loom behind stoic, mustachioed boys on bass and guitar.

New Young Pony Club Video and EP Stream

There’s nothing particularly new about the New Young Pony Club as far as style is concerned—trust-fund faux-artist types in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, have been experimenting with electronic music while glammed out in pumps, eighties prom dresses and side ponytails for a few years. But NYPC has the shtick down particularly well: they possess naïve sweetness, heavily invoked by their pervasive candy obsession, that’s almost wholesome. Kind of like eating an ice cream cone on a spring day—there’s nothing wrong with a treat once in a while, and if ice cream and sex are your treats of choice (rather than, say, heroin) it all seems pretty healthy.

“Get Dancing” and “Descend”, the EP’s other two singles, follow a formula similar to “Ice Cream”: impeccable dance songs with saucy female talk-sing vocals and an infectious, incessant beat. I haven’t found myself dancing while waiting at the bus stop like this since Ratatat’s Classics.

The New Young Pony Club EP is fully prepared for “Ice Cream’s” club viability. So much so that the EP includes three remixes: the spacey “Comets Remix” emphasizes vocalist Tahita’s panting, the speedy Van She Remix adds a sharp texture with cutting synth chords, and DJ Medhi’s remix has a light, sparse feel.

With the inclusion of so many remixes as well as the luscious “Ice Cream” video, the New Young Pony Club EP is—like the band itself—all about the frosting. If you have a taste for dance-pop confectionery, watch out. The New Young Pony Club is pretty damn addictive.

-Mary Mulholland

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