Interviews: Breaking curses with Sam and Matty of PONY

When a psychic tells you that you have a dark spirit attached to you, what do you do? If you’re anything like PONY the answer is easy; you write a record to exorcise it, something they do with spectacular style on their third album Clearly Cursed. The ten tra…

When a psychic tells you that you have a dark spirit attached to you, what do you do? If you’re anything like PONY the answer is easy; you write a record to exorcise it, something they do with spectacular style on their third album Clearly Cursed. The ten tracks that make up the album are some of PONY’s strongest to date as they infuse their glitter-filled grunge-y power pop with goth, emo, and alt rock elements, creating a perfect balance of fuzz and crispness.

Whether they are contemplating curses on the title track, dealing with difficult emotions on “Superglue”, or paying tribute to a beloved pet on “Middle of Summer”, their dedication to songwriting and knack for creating incredibly infectious vocal harmonies are on full display. Clearly Cursed is available everywhere on Friday, February 13 via Take This To Heart Records. PONY will be playing a handful of Canadian shows later this month and will be touring the US with Heart Attack Man, phoneboy, and Slow Joy in April.

Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with vocalist Sam Bielanski and guitarist Matty Morand to talk about the album, creating the Clearly Cursed universe, great vegan spots, and so much more. Read the interview below! This interview between Em Moore, Sam Bielanski, and Matty Morand took place on February 5, 2026 via Zoom. What follows is a transcription of their conversation that has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Clearly Cursed is your first album to feature touring members Christian Beale and Joey Ginaldi. How did this version of the band come together? Sam: We’ve been playing with Christian pretty much ever since shows came back after the pandemic. Matty: We played with him on our last tour before the pandemic, but it got cut short. We had cycled through a few different drummers and we had a really long tour coming up with Drug Church and we didn’t have a drummer.

Sam: We were announcing the tour and we didn’t have a drummer and we were like, “This is so crazy, but whatever, we’ll do what we do!” Then I went to the Instagram profile of the guy who made the tour flyer because I wanted to tag him in the post. I was like, “Looks like this guy plays the drums! Should we ask him?” [laughs] Matty: [laughs] So I messaged him. We had never talked before, but we followed each other and I said, “Do you want to play drums on the tour lol” and he said yes.

We didn’t meet until a couple days before the tour. Sam: It worked out so well. He is, for lack of a better word, such a nerd about music and so it just made sense that we would make the record with him because he brought so much to the table. His influences are so vast. Matty: Yeah, it was kind of the first time we’ve let someone else contribute in that way, too. It was nice that he came in with stuff ready to go.

Matty: It took some pressure off, in some ways. We spend so much time with the songs and are so meticulous with the way that we demo. The songs go through a bunch of different stages. There’s usually three pretty distinct versions of the demo before we record. There’s a lot of big picture stuff that has to be done and a lot of detail work. It’s nice to have somebody else come in fresh who hasn’t been there since moment one with the song to be able to contribute something that maybe you don’t hear because you spent so much time with it.

It’s like, “Well, this is the song. This is what it sounds like now,” then somebody else comes in like, “What if we did this?” And you’re like, “Wow! I never considered that you could do this.” [laughs] Sam: He came so prepared. He had some stuff that he wanted to do, but at the end of the day it’s our record, so we were like, “Well, I like a bit of that. Can you try it like this?

Can you try it like that?” and he just was like, “Yep.” Sam: Very adaptable in the studio. That is where I have so much trauma with allowing other people sometimes to be collaborative. Sometimes it becomes hard to communicate. Sam: And you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but at the end of the day, you want to be able to listen to the song you wrote forever and not be reminded that there was animosity in the studio when you made it.

Some of your photos from the studio have a plastic rat or rats in them. What’s the story behind the rats? Sam: A couple summers ago, we had a rat infestation in our backyard. I had never spent more time in my backyard than when we had the infestation; I would go out every night and just watch them run around. I would say, “Matty, it’s time for Rat TV! We have to go watch the rats.” Matty: It was kind of low-stakes for us because we lived in a house where the neighbours to one side had just put in a vegetable garden, and on the other side was a fourplex apartment building and all their garbage was at the back.

We were like the highway between the two locations. Sam: People were like, “They’re going to start coming into the house soon,” and I was like, “I don’t think so. There’s more stuff outside for them.” Sam: I became obsessed with rats, then I found this little rat at the dollar store for Halloween. I took a picture of it and sent it in the group. Joey, our drummer, was like, “You have to bring that to be on stage with us.” I brought it on tour and he was onstage every single night with us, so it just felt right that he would also be in the studio with us.

You worked with Alex Gamble on this album, who you also worked with on your second album Velveteen. How did this creative partnership begin? Matty: We had worked with some other people in the past and were pivoting away from that. We were on tour with the band Fucked Up and we were talking about finding somebody to work on the record with. The guitar player, Mike, was like, “Oh, you have to meet this guy Alex.

He’s really good, really fast. He works hard. I’m gonna text him for you.” He got in touch with him right away and then we connected with him and we really, really, really clicked with him right away. It was such a pleasure to work with him. He is really fast, works really long hours, gets a lot done, and has good ideas. He is really good about pursuing our ideas and seeing what works and giving everything a chance.

We love working with him. He’s taken some big career steps as an Atmos mixer and was adjacent to a bunch of Grammy winning artists this year; he worked on the FKA twigs record and a bunch of others. Hopefully, he’ll still have time for us. We love Alex Gamble. Sam: He’s so fast that we get to try every single idea, which is usually not the case in the studio. When we first met him, one of the first things he asked us, which I thought was so telling of the kind of guy he is, was: What are things that you’ve experienced in the studio in the past that you didn’t like?

We were able to be like, “This, this, this, and this,” and he was like, “Great, we’re not going to do any of that then.” We were able to create a safe space for creativity, which was a first for me in the studio. Sam: Yeah! Especially when you’re making music or making art. It sucks to feel like you don’t want to speak up about your ideas because you’re afraid of what the other people in the room might say.

Matty: It’s like a plugin. I don’t know how new it is because the user interface looks really outdated, but you put a sample – any sample – into it and you can play the sample like a keyboard. It slices it up for you, so whatever pad you’re hitting plays that single slice of it. You can make some pretty interesting drum loops out of that. We used that on “Swallowing Stars”, I think. Sam: It was so cool!

At first, when he was doing it, it was like, “This is crazy!!” Then we liked it so much that every time we would get a mix back, we would be like, “We have to make those drums louder!” Sam: It’s very different all the time. I like to always challenge myself so I don’t get stuck in a rut. Sometimes I’ll be like, “I’m going to write a song in this key with this BPM and really, staunchly stay in those parameters,” just as a jumping off point.

On this record, some of the songs Matty wrote the instrumentals first and then I would write the vocal melody and lyrics. On “Sunny Something” I was feeling like, “I suck at writing basslines! I’m going to start this song by writing a bassline,” and that’s how I started writing that song. I feel like we don’t really have a formulaic way of doing things anymore because we’re always trying to challenge ourselves.

It usually starts off with me making a little song on my phone and then Matty will embellish it and we’ll work on it together. Then we’ll work on it with the guys and work on it with Alex. We’re always changing it up. Matty: If you can get Logic Pro open, that’s the majority of the battle. After that, we’re kind of just doing whatever works. Sam: Yeah, exactly! You get to try new things.

It’s ok to fail too, because you can be like, “Oh, this sucks,” but maybe one part of it will end up in a song or something. Did any of the “failures” make it onto the album? Anything you were like, “I’m not sure about this,” but then on a re-listen, you were like, “Oh, there’s actually gold in here”? Matty: The title track of the album, “Clearly Cursed”, was originally a song I wrote for our other project, Heavenly Sweetheart.

I was never able to write a vocal melody for it that I liked, so it just sat as an instrumental for a really long time. I just assumed that nothing would ever happen with it, and then Sam heard it and was like, “Oh, I want to try something on this.” That one was almost a nothing song and then it wasn’t. Sam: Yeah, “Middle of Summer” too. I started that song as an iPhone demo and I sent it to Matty, who was like, “I really like this, let’s work on it together.” We were working on it, and working on it, and working on it, and we were like, “This sounds like a Christmas song!” Sam: “We’ve ruined this song!” Then we had to take a break from writing it.

Sam: Then we came back and listened to it and were like, “Did we write the single greatest song that’s ever been written?” Matty: “Blame Me” went through some pretty significant changes. That was a song that we struggled with figuring out how to make it work. Matty: The part that’s the bridge used to be the pre-chorus and it opened with an instrumental section. There’s a ton of changes.

We had sent the keyboard player from MSPaint, Nick, a version of it early on and he had some ideas for it, like little tips for it. A lot of stuff went on with that one. Sam: I feel like we’re very reluctant to throw a song away. We’re like, “No, we’re going to beat this song into a hit. We’re going to do whatever we can.” [laughs] There’s very few songs where we’re like, “We can’t.” Matty: They always come to the finish line.

The finish line being at least pre-Alex Gamble. There’s nothing that ever gets abandoned, really. One of my favourite songs on the album is “Hot and Mean”, what’s the story behind that one? Sam: That was one of the first songs I wrote for the record. I wrote a song that was trying to be when you get out of a bad breakup and you don’t know who you are anymore and the past few months, or however long you were in this relationship, flash before your eyes and you can see all the moments where you just laid down when you should’ve stood up for yourself.

It’s kind of about that. I wrote it as a demo and then Matty embellished it. I didn’t like it, actually, and then you were so adamant about it. This one changed a lot too. Matty: What Sam was saying earlier about the way we approach writing songs and things change, you end up writing different parts of the songs. The lead guitar part at the beginning of the song was something that Sam wrote and I was like, “We have to keep this.” Sam: I was like, “Let’s change it.

You’re a way better guitar player than me, let’s just change it,” and Matty was like, “No. We’re not changing it.” I was like, “Oh no!!” Why was that the end of the world to me? This song was also very simple when we wrote it, and I think I was like, “How can we make this different? What can we do?” Then you added the instrumental bridge. We were really into Life Without Buildings at the time, and I was like, “What if we did a Life Without Buildings-style bridge in the song?” That’s how that came in and that’s what really has made me fall in love with the song so much more.

We kind of pivoted a little bit to do something different. Matty: The end of the song, when the instruments drop out and it’s just that big stack of vocal harmonies as it fades out, was an Alex Gamble idea. That’s not how the song ended originally. That was kind of a big breakthrough moment with that song for us. Sam is in Brian Wilson-mode on that one; it’s crazy to listen to isolated. With the title and on some of the songs, you talk about feeling cursed, and Sam, in the description for the album, you said it was inspired by something a psychic told you.

On your podcast, you mentioned doing a spell to try to get rid of bad luck. Do you feel like the curse has been lifted? Sam: You know, I really do. I do feel like the curse has been lifted. I wanted this album cycle to feel as though I was exorcising my demons and so far, so good. Matty: The city that we live in, Windsor, Ontario, is also bizarrely witchy, like way more witchy than you would expect an ultra blue-collar city to be for some reason.

We’ve been able to ask multiple people if they think that Sam has a dark spirit attachment and they said no. [laughs] You created all the visuals for Clearly Cursed, including the videos for all five of your singles. What went into making the visual world for this album? Matty: It used to be something we were really afraid of doing, I think. It always felt really hard. Sam: Yeah, or like we weren’t skilled enough to do it because it’s not what we do, we do the music.

When we lived in Toronto we would have these super creative friends who could make beautiful videos for us, but living here, you’re so isolated. I started doing it kind of on my own, then Matty was like, “I’ll help you because what do you mean you’ll do it on your own?” So I roped Matty into it. We are pretty big cinephiles, I would say. Sam: We like movies. We like horror movies and we were watching a lot of horror movies while we were making the record, like Rosemary’s Baby and Possession.

Sam: We watched all these nunsploitation films, so that stuff really inspired the aesthetic. Sam: Pearl was really inspirational and Jennifer’s Body. We were living in a little horror world, so I wanted to create a visual universe that the songs could all live in. I think their visuals really helped tie them together in this little, macabre sort of universe. Matty: We were both raised Catholic too.

Even if you’ve strayed from Catholicism, like we have, all the visuals from it are so incredible. Sam: I feel like that the basement of a church is my childhood nostalgia. We went to a Polish church, so it just tip-to-tail felt haunted from the moment I got there until the moment I left. It was as old as old could be and dusty, but also opulent. 
 Your video for “Swallowing Stars” has some animation by Nicolette Sara Alvarez of Pool Kids and James Palko of Pretty Rude.

How did that collaboration happen? Sam: We just finished a tour with Pool Kids, and so that’s how we were acquainted with Nicolette. Matty: And before that, we had also toured with James with his band Jimmy Montague. So a heavy James-Nicolette year for us. Sam: I was like, “This is so cool! This looks amazing.” So I made a little mood board and I sent it to Nicolette like, “Do you think you could make me some animations like this that we could use for a music video?” and she was like, “Absolutely.” They really slayed.

Every single file they sent us ended up getting put in the video. Matty: Every crumb of it. Then we bought a walking pad, and it was as simple as that. [laughs] Sam: Yeah, and we’ve done so many in our house. I think it’s so cool to be like, “this we shot on our roof,” or “this we shot in our alley,” or “this we shot in our bedroom.” It’s like playing Barbies, but with real people and a camera.

[laughs] You have some Canadian shows later this month and you’ll be touring the US with Heart Attack Man and Phoneboy in April. What are you looking forward to about these shows? Sam: We’ve been doing a lot of first of three / first of four shows, so we haven’t been able to play a lot of songs. I’m really excited for these Canadian shows because we have a longer set and we’re gonna get to play a lot more songs, which I am very excited about.

Matty: We also haven’t really been able to play a hometown show here in Windsor for quite a while. We’re gonna get to play a lot of the album and Joey’s coming out from Philly to do it with us, so it’s gonna be cool. It’s gonna be fun. Sam: Yeah. I’m excited to play “Hot and Mean” live; that one’s been really fun to practice. Matty: I think just the whole visual identity we’ve been able to create with it; the videos, the artwork, and the way that it relates to the music and the whole package.

That’s a little bit of a cop-out answer [laughs], but I think we’ve been successful in creating a little universe around it.

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