“Pur Sun” the new single from the upcoming album Ponyboy by the band of the legendary bassist Tim Lefebvre (Bowie, McCaslin, Tedeschi Trucks Band) Whose Hat Is This? is out today. The album is available for pre-order at Heartcore Records and will be released on CD and as a digital album worldwide on all digital platforms on April 26th, 2024.

The incredible virtuosity and visceral energy that each band member brings to Whose Hat Is This? is on full display on Ponyboy. “Everybody in this band loves to rock out and play instinctually,” says Lefebvre of his bandmates and indeed, the visceral energy of Ponyboy is palpable. The album opens with “Over Under,” a song that came from a propulsive rhythmic vamp by Johnson, melding with spurts of Lefebvre’s muscular bass while William’s jagged saxophone lines punctuate through the din. KOKAYI’s witty, acerbic lyrics sail over the fray, riffing on xenophobic class structures, skyrocketing rents, and the gentrification of New York’s oldest neighborhoods. Lefebvre says, “We composed Ponyboy with KOKAYI in mind…his ears are so huge. That’s what’s making this cook with gas.” The fuzzy building-leveling backbeat of “Pur Sun” moves like a wrecking ball, its gravity pulsing the song towards KOKAYI’s chorus: “We all need a bit sunshine/A little water so that we grow,” the band strutting with such overwhelming confidence that the sentiment comes across like a revolutionary chant. On “Diamonds”, Max Milner’s limber voice rises out of the band’s hypnotic polyrhythmic phrases, lulling the listener into a dreamworld before William’s solo spills out of his horn like molten mercury. Ponyboy’s longest and most progressive track, “Unnnnhhhh”, swelters in a minimalist horizon of synthesizer and flute before Lefebvre’s bass takes center stage, his signature 808-inflected flat-wound thump segueing into motorik synthesizer lines and groaning melodic lines against clusters of Willam’s horns and Greenwell and Johnson’s dueling drums. 

The title Ponyboy comes from the character in S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. The band all feel like outsiders in their respective musical worlds, and indeed all the members of the band are far from traditionalists. On Ponyboy, Whose Hat Is This? explore the outer reaches of the groove, finding connections between far-flung musical lineages through the sheer rapture of playing music together. In an era of social unrest and pop commodification, this unlikely gang of musical misfits might just be the supergroup we need.