The trouble with becoming a million-dollar man is that somebody has to keep agreeing on the valuation. Every admiring glance becomes confirmation, every slight a threat to the entire enterprise. In the video for MILLION DOLLAR MAN, Brooklyn’s PONS turn that dependence on approval into a garish spectacle, with Jack Parker grinning through sunglasses as his image splits, smears, and changes colour. It is an apt introduction to RACECAR, their new album, released November 5 through Casa Gogol Records, the label founded by Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz.
Parker traces the song’s beginnings to a month in Morocco following the collapse of an earlier PONS lineup and a cancelled European tour. In Marrakech, the repetition and call-and-response of Amazigh trance music performed by street musicians suggested a connection with the dance records occupying his headphones. Listening to releases from Sahel Sounds and artists such as Koudede helped develop that interest into MILLION DOLLAR MAN. Returning to Morocco after PONS’ 2026 European tour, he filmed its video with frequent collaborator Gigi Barwald.
The result subjects Parker’s extravagant mugging to an almost continuous electronic makeover. Rooftops and blue-painted hillside buildings sit behind a figure who keeps dissolving into acidic colour, television static, and overlapping versions of himself. Oversized sunglasses and a bottle of wine supply the props; the editing supplies the identity crisis. Parker describes the intended mixture as “half part Naked Lunch and half part Hotline Miami.” The joke comes through clearly: a man desperate to occupy the entire picture can scarcely keep his own face intact.
Parker explains:
“Lyrically, ‘MILLION DOLLAR MAN’ explores over the top embodiments of hyper masculinity, narcissism, ego, fragility, and money. It’s from the point of view of someone who has become self aware of the power that they hold and how they can exploit it to benefit themselves as well as the deep insecurity that often influences brash and obnoxious behavior. The album Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino was a very big lyrical inspiration for me on this track specifically and throughout the album as a whole.”
Watch the video for MILLION DOLLAR MAN below:
RACECAR took shape across 28 consecutive days in New York City during the summer of 2025, after an offer to support Gogol Bordello left Parker a month to assemble music and a band. That pressure carries into arrangements which keep finding another gear, another voice, another instrument demanding admission. Electroclash, dance-punk, industrial electronics, and orchestral flourishes crowd together with considerable purpose: these songs concern people whose appetite for attention, wealth, and advancement has outgrown their ability to enjoy any of it. The futuristic setting draws on Blade Runner and Brave New World, while the lyrics keep reaching back toward Rome. Progress has acquired some very old ambitions.
AUTOGRAPH opens the album with hollow metallic percussion, its tropical bounce suggesting a rhythm section assembled from pipes and whatever else might ring when struck. Parker’s phrasing carries a touch of Damon Albarn’s conversational mischief before a bright, feminine vocal sends the song towards hyperpop. Shouted responses, buoyant beats, and overlapping voices pull 1990s electronica into contact with British alternative pop, then a solo builds towards an electroclash finish. The changes arrive with the cheerful unpredictability of someone repeatedly grabbing the wheel.
Its celebrity aspirant has a similarly flexible personality, replacing yesterday’s self whenever a more profitable version becomes available. Contacts, access, money, and desirability blur into one sales pitch. Beneath the demand for an autograph sits a more ordinary wish to be wanted, and the eventual appeal to a lover lets a little tenderness slip through the self-promotion. The opener establishes a useful tension for the whole record: these grotesques remain susceptible to recognisable human needs.
Watch the video for AUTOGRAPH below:
CITY SLICKER takes its time furnishing the nightclub. A rippling synthesizer sequence places Kraftwerk’s precision beside the glide of 1970s electronic disco; sizzling percussion, descending keyboard chords, brassy tones, and bending pitches gradually fill the space. When the male and female voices finally shout together, the track has become a wonderfully elastic dance-floor proposition. Its lyrics introduce the city as a system of fees and favours, where pleasure repeats on command and status always costs more than expected. The invitation to bite the hand that never feeds neatly overturns the usual advice about gratitude: what, exactly, has the arrangement provided? Echoing, manipulated vocals, a distorted kick, and jungle-like sounds make the break increasingly disorienting before acoustic guitar strumming supplies a beautifully incongruous exit.
Watch the video for CITY SLICKER below:
BRONSON brings the city’s suspicious activity into sharper focus. A muffled snare clears, an electronic melody charges forward, and Parker starts recounting sightings with the irritated vigilance of a commuter whose journey has become somebody else’s criminal operation. Banks, briefcases, hourly news checks, and apparently interchangeable faces accumulate around the practical business of paying bills and keeping a client fed. The repeated declarations of what he saw offer certainty, although the details suggest a man struggling to interpret the transaction unfolding in front of him. Metallic flutter and additional layers tighten the arrangement as his dry post-punk delivery grows more openly agitated. By the final third, the account has become frantic; the departing pitch-shifted synths leave its questions unanswered. The song catches how easily economic necessity can make complicity sound like common sense.
MILLION DOLLAR MAN, the fourth track, turns that anxiety into a public performance of invincibility. Deep, rippling synths initially suggest darkwave before a higher electronic figure, shuffling drums, and metallic clatter pull the song towards electroclash. Parker half-speaks and half-sings his pitch, punctuated by a reverberating feminine “yeah,” until the dance beat takes hold with a Sextile-like bounce. His voice then approaches a Trent Reznor-style scream as the arrangement hardens into body music, with shouted exchanges and peculiar harmonies crowding the rhythm.
The lyrics expose the dependence beneath the display: a man who claims exceptional power still needs somebody to tell him he is the only one. Click farming, backroom influence, and inherited privilege sit beside the almost childlike wish to occupy another person’s first waking thought. Just as the groove becomes comfortable, a buzzing synth break and muttered delivery interrupt the performance. The ensuing drum barrage sounds like an attempt to overwhelm a doubt that has already been heard.
ON THE LAM sends the whole enterprise hurtling through a malfunctioning amusement park. A bright, unstable synth melody, hyperactive beat, and repeated yowl give the track the giddy movement of an old platform game played far too quickly. Parker’s more unhinged phrases suggest Nick Cave during the Birthday Party years, while the harmonies tug the performance towards synth-punk. There is something wonderfully cartoonish about the contrast between that spring-loaded music and lyrics full of concealed tracks, suspected informers, and revised reputations. Straightening a tie becomes almost indistinguishable from tightening a noose. By the time Parker starts singing about rewriting his image for posterity, the flight has become a publicity campaign, with a pistol and a list of names lending urgency to the rebrand.
HOT AIR [PRELUDE] briefly gives the record a different scale. Repeating, horn-like figures and fluttering flute sounds introduce an orchestral flourish before passing directly into the song proper. Its compact fanfare prepares the entrance of another person with a great deal to say.
HOT AIR follows with brassy momentum, emphatic piano strikes, and punk vocals riding a buoyant new wave rhythm. The arrangement’s big-band extravagance recalls JG Thirlwell and Foetus, with a little of Diamond Dogs’ theatrical scale in the way it makes a personal grievance seem fit for a public spectacle. Parker begins by dismissing somebody’s talk, yet the complaint soon reveals the hurt beneath it: declarations of love have failed to prevent abandonment, and promises of change have become another form of exhausted conversation. A gentler passage of violin and smooth crooning opens that wound before the full arrangement returns. The late insistence that things are improving sounds increasingly precarious against an unwelcoming city and the suspicion that the worst may still be approaching.
IF NOT NOW…, which Post-Punk.com has previously featured, makes impatience both its subject and its organising principle. A tapping, Morse-like electronic figure meets rubbery synth stabs before the drums propel the opening forward. The vocal attack catches something of the Knack’s My Sharona, then expands into the heightened delivery of the post-punk revival. Male and female voices arrive in rapid exchanges as the song switches between its loping stride and a more accelerated rush. Processed grunts and clanging piano complicate the movement; violins enter around the midpoint, making the arrangement feel increasingly extravagant.
The demand to act now grows more troubling as references to Romulus, conquest, privileged dealings, and divine favour gather around it. Desire becomes an excuse for possession as Parker sings of claiming a place among those who decide how history will be remembered. A slower passage of languid vocals, chiming piano, and reedy tones eventually gives way to a drinking-song stomp and saxophone, allowing that hunger for power to become alarmingly convivial. Animator Arturo Baston’s accompanying video supplies an appropriately grotesque carnival ride.
Watch the video for IF NOT NOW… below:
PLIGHT OF THE FOOL makes the machinery harder to escape. A thick, propulsive drumbeat presses against wiry synth textures while the vocal races through obedience, disposable people, focus groups, and company policy. The language reduces human beings to data and marketable characteristics, then asks what a head is for if thinking brings no useful reward. A dull, jackhammer-like repetition enters the increasingly dense mix, and Parker’s delivery acquires an industrial abrasion somewhere between Nine Inch Nails and Filter. The subsequent slowdown is particularly effective: the voice drops into a distorted lower register, and the beat assumes a heavy, almost processional weight. All that earlier scrambling has led to an arrangement which feels brutally difficult to move.
MASK EATS FACE inherits that oppressive weight and develops it into the album’s major finale. A thick kick, industrial buzzing, and cold electronic chimes accumulate tension beneath the lowered, distorted voice. As the rhythm accelerates and the vocal becomes clearer, an organ-like synth figure bends upwards into a squeal. There is more of Foetus’ grotesque theatricality in the collision of synth-punk urgency and oversized menace, although the track keeps finding its own strange routes through the pressure. A vocal break gives space to a mournful, coded electronic figure and buzzing sounds moving across the stereo field; colder synths then gather around the rapid percussion before a bass-driven passage leads into a denouement with an expansive, progressive-synth character.
Here, the album’s obsession with advancement reaches its most direct reckoning. Parker sings of finally obtaining what he wanted, only to discover that the public identity has consumed the person underneath. Deals, war, masculine self-assertion, and fantasies of a glorious legacy collapse into the same ruinous appetite. The image of wax wings gives the ambition an unmistakable destination, even as the closing words reach towards escape. PONS allow that possibility to remain unsettled; wanting freedom is hardly proof that this particular man knows how to stop.
CRASHTEST follows as a minute-long postscript, with strings, woodwinds, saxophone, and trombone. Its title completes the record’s running argument about acceleration. After so many characters mistake forward movement for progress, the prospect of impact makes a fitting final thought.
RACECAR is a terrific exercise in excess with a sharp ear for its costs. PONS make ambition danceable, vanity ridiculous, and the pursuit of pleasure increasingly difficult to separate from panic. The hooks give those ideas immediate appeal, while the sudden changes of voice, pace, and instrumentation keep exposing the instability underneath. For all its crowded arrangements, the album has a remarkably clear sense of the people trapped inside them: forever upgrading the image, forever hungry for the next affirmation, and increasingly unsure who is supposed to be enjoying the ride.
Listen to RACECAR below, order the album here, or find additional streaming options here.
Built around Parker’s songwriting and a determined DIY touring ethic, PONS have shared stages with Gogol Bordello, Bush Tetras, A Place To Bury Strangers, Lambrini Girls, Laura Jane Grace, and Geese. RACECAR brings that live appetite into an unusually broad ensemble: Ozzie Silva contributes drums, Steve La Rosa provides string arrangements and production, and Zoltán Sindhu handles production, engineering, and mixing, with mastering by Dave Cooley. Contributions from string players, woodwinds, brass, marimba, and backing vocalists help Parker push the songs into their many improbable shapes.
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