CONO (Vinyl)
CONO is the third album from Pop Filter, a band of friends whose strong bonds stretch across multiple cities and who’s musical lineage name checks Snowy Band, Cool Sounds, and The Ocean Party to name a few. Coming three years after the band’s last offering, 2020’s Donkey Gully Road, the band returned with an album recorded over a few months in mid-2022. Where the first two albums were recorded on weekends away in condensed periods of time, CONO was the product of weekly meet-ups, of whoever could make it along to their makeshift studio in an industrial estate in Coburg North (also where the album takes its name). The band squeezed together in the tiny room and pieced together the tracks over hot chips. The result is an album that is unashamedly honest and full of off-the-cuff charm and low-key pop brilliance. Lyrically the album picks up where Donkey Gully Road left off, exploring place, isolation, purpose, and lack thereof.
Pop Filter isn’t a band pretending to be anything more or less than what they are. The songs are reflective and sincere but manage to never feel self-indulgent. Musically Pop Filter are more open than they have ever been, varying levels of fidelity and musical stylings culminate on an album that still feels cohesive and sequenced. A low-key voice memo on a mobile phone sits alongside a snappy garage pop strummer before the instrumentation opens up into sparse country-tinged balladry. After enduring the longest period of time that this prolific group of friends has probably ever gone without releasing new material, you‘ve waited long enough for this one. Savour it!
