“We’re leaving everything in the past”: Inside Dead Pony’s fiery, fearless return

Dead Pony know they won’t be ignored anymore. Their jagged debut album IGNORE THIS was a high-octane expulsion of energy and frustration that surfaced in early 2024, and in the two years that followed, it let them feel seen and celebrated in the way they had always craved. Along the way, they got to play their first headline tour, open for You Me At Six and Kids In Glass Houses and smash some bucket-list festival moments including the main stage of 2000trees and their Download debut.

“I look back and listen to the album, which I love and have so much appreciation for, and I’m like, ‘God, I was so angry!’” vocalist Anna Shields laughs, catching up with Kerrang! the morning before a studio session. “It’s like, ‘Girl, relax!’ I do appreciate where that album took us. It’s nice because as a musician, sometimes it’s hard to appreciate where you are in the moment. But when you look back at yourself a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, you really understand how you’ve developed.”

A year or so has passed since they last released music in the form of the brass-knuckled standalone single Everything Burns, and in the interim, Dead Pony have been in the studio drawing the map of their future. It’s still an ongoing process, but for the moment, they’re offering a snapshot of who they are right now with the electrifying Eat My Dust!, with an EP to follow.

“It sounds so different from what we released previously,” Anna remarks. “It’s way more refined. We’ve been going for an early-2000s sound, inspired by a lot of the artists that we listened to when we were teenagers, and we’re definitely getting heavier. When we were teenagers and we would listen to Linkin Park and Paramore and Limp Bizkit, all of these bands, it would make us feel something. When you’re that age, you just feel everything so intensely, don’t you?

“I think that we wanted to pay homage to that era of our lives – that really was the formative years of us shaping our musical identity. Ten years ago, we probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to revisit that era of music, because it wasn’t as accepted. Now, I feel like now that genre has become way more accepted and widespread. It’s more mainstream than it once was.”

What’s been the most significant thing you’ve learned from the whole IGNORE THIS album cycle?
“One of the things that we learned was to trust ourselves enough to know that we will make music that means something to our fans. When we made IGNORE THIS, we were experimenting with new sounds, we were getting a bit heavier, and it’s always quite nerve-wracking when you try and switch things up, because you’re always curious as to how it’s going to be received. The one thing we learned is that people like Dead Pony for Dead Pony, and they like our style of songwriting, no matter how we’re doing it and they’ll appreciate that we’ve put so much effort into creating this body of work.”

What’s it been like to process that newfound success?
“I feel like not much has changed in terms of how I process it. I do feel like I’m very lucky that we’re all best friends and we all move through the motions together and support each other through success and failures. But one thing I have learned is to just mute the comments on TikTok and YouTube – don’t even look there, because you just end up down a depression hole! The one thing that I would say that I’ve done to cope with any success is just don’t listen to the haters.”

You had a busy 2025, with your first appearance at Download and support slots with both You Me At Six and Kids In Glass Houses. How else would you sum the past year up?
“I feel like 2025 was like a really strange year for us, because we didn’t release any music. We were just working on new music, but we also did so because in comparison to the year before, it was actually a very quiet year. We did have a lot of bucket-list moments, but we did have quite a tumultuous year where we had a lot of change happening. I won’t bore you with it, but we just spent the majority of the year channelling a lot of our feelings into new music because we had some extra free time.”

When you got back to writing music, did you have a particular vision in mind for what you wanted to do, or did your creative objectives form themselves as you went along?
“I think that it’s constantly been evolving – like when we wrote IGNORE THIS and we were definitely pushing it to be heavier and more alternative. But the new stuff that we’re writing and recording and releasing now, to me, just sounds so different from what we had released previously. Eat My Dust! is one of our heaviest songs to date.”

Whereabouts in the process of making this new music did the single arrive?
“Blair [Crichton, guitar/programming] had written the initial idea and came up with the initial spark. I think he said to me, ‘I want to call this song Eat My Dust! and I want to write it about leaving everything in the past, leaving your haters in the past and just being like, “We’re going to do so well and you’re going to be left behind.”’ It was one of those songs that just came out quite quickly – we went into the studio, and the lyrics just flowed. It just came really naturally.
“I feel like our last single, Everything Burns, was pretty heavy. We were like, ‘Do you know what? Let’s just write another really heavy banger that sounds really cool but the melodies are also really beautiful melodies, and the lyrics are really heartfelt.’”

This is the first single from the new EP. What made you want to go down that route rather than jumping straight into album two?
“We had these songs that just fitted so well together, and they created such a vibe for us. We’ve been playing these particular songs live and they really resonate with people. Because we haven’t released music in well over a year now, I feel like we wanted to put out a nice body of work that summarised what we’ve been doing. Once we’ve given that to our fans, we can then start to think about what the next thing is.”

Eat My Dust! is out now. Catch Dead Pony at Slam Dunk Festival at Hatfield Park on Saturday, May 23 and Leeds Temple Newsam on Sunday, May 24 – get your tickets now. After that they play All Points East with twenty one pilots on Sunday, August 30.

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