According to Sam Bielanski, frontwoman of Toronto indie-pop duo PONY, the idea for Clearly Cursed came from her first visit to a psychic. During this encounter, the psychic read Bielanski’s tarot cards and stated that Bielanski’s boyfriend was cheating on her—which turned out to be true—and that, more crucially, Bielanski had a dark spirit attached to her soul. For the low, low price of $1,500, the psychic promised to exorcise this demon. Bielanski, 21 years old at the time, couldn’t pony up the cash, and she left her psychic visit realizing she’d have to coexist with this curse for the rest of her life.
But if Bielanski is indeed marked by a maleficent spirit, you can’t tell on Clearly Cursed—not with how bubbly and spunky its tracks are. PONY, which consists of Bielanski and guitarist Matty Morand, demonstrated on 2023’s Velveteen that they were pros of the cheery crunch-pop banger. And while it’s true that Clearly Cursed addresses some thorny themes—envy, toxic friendships, self-blame—in classic PONY fashion, these musings are couched in fuzzy guitars, twee vocals, and big sugar-rush hooks. It would almost seem deceptive if it weren’t so damn delightful. Album highlight “Middle of Summer” is sun-dappled and joyous as a July afternoon, all groovy bass and windchime-like synth keys and lush, breezy choruses. Only by listening closely to the lyrics—“And now I’m a dead weight drowner / How could you die in the middle of summer”—can you glean the mournful heart of the track, which was written after Bielanski’s cat Frep had passed away.
Throughout Clearly Cursed, these dark moments are frequently undercut by a touch of lightness. “Freezer” and “Superglue” both wrestle with jealousy, but their jangly crunch-pop choruses sound almost innocent; they evoke less a feeling of toxic resentment and more the open-eyed, youthful jealousy of not quite knowing your own place in the world and looking towards others to figure out who you’re meant to be. On the title track, Bielanski recounts life spent under a dark spirit—frozen in time, ignored as an uncracked spine, tracing the same spot over and over—yet her voice, instantly evocative of Leigh Nash’s from Sixpence None the Richer, is gorgeously dreamy and earnest. Clearly, being cursed has never sounded sweeter.
There’s a youthful energy that courses throughout Clearly Cursed, lending its tracks a smack of coming-of-age storytelling. “Hot and Mean” is punchy, with a mean little guitar riff and a performance that leans best into Bielanski’s bratty, saccharine voice. It can be a little cutesy, sometimes recalling a Disney Channel original movie rebel—striped tie over a T-shirt and everything—but its concerns are genuine, grappling with the unsettled emotional messiness of both relationships and feeling rough around the edges. And even in a cursed life there are bright spots; here, that’s “Brilliant Blue,” another album highlight that’s sticky and giddy as a Starburst, practically oozing with the type of young infatuation that stains your tongue blue raspberry.
With its shimmery, sugary fuzz-pop sound, PONY’s music is often described as the type of exuberant pop-rock you’d hear in a teen movie. That feels right to me. I can imagine so many of Clearly Cursed’s songs peppered throughout, say, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and the toxic friendship send-off “Every Little Crumb” is what I imagine Janis and Damian listening to as they swerve down the street, leaving behind a Plastics-ified Cady in Mean Girls.
But even beyond mere sonic resemblance, the descriptor still fits. After all, teen movies understand better than most that life is clearly cursed: that everything that can possibly go wrong will always go wrong, that you will show up at fancy dress parties dressed as a bumbling olive, that you will be jealous and messy and fall in and out of friendships and lose loved ones and meet loved ones and make the same mistakes over and over until you don’t. And that, even in the midst of this, there will be sunshine-y ebullient hooks and you will still feel like singing and dancing and the worst can still be delivered with pure, unadulterated, radiating lightness like PONY does on Clearly Cursed. And that’s exactly what growing pains are all about. [Take This To Heart]
Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and other publications. You can find her on Twitter @999orangejuice.
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