After their thrilling 2019 psych-pop album, *Tasmania*, Australian band Pond wanted to try a more spontaneous way of working for their next album. Taking inspiration from Can's book on krautrock outliers, Pond embarked on a series of completely improvised jams from which songs and ideas could be extracted. Nick Allbrook’s (ex-Tame Impala guitarist, keyboardist, and bassist) songs take a more impressionistic turn here than before, which leads to both hilarious one-liners on the gonzo-thrash of "Human Touch" and social and environmental concerns on "Toast", which addresses both the 2020 bushfires and the appalling wealth gap in his childhood hometown. Above all, *9* offers a sense of creative abandon and simply fun.