Danielle Ponder – Power
Danielle Ponder has signed to Dead Oceans, the label that’s home to Mitski and Japanese Breakfast, in partnership with Phoebe Bridgers. To mark it, and to honor Juneteenth, she’s released “Power,” her first new music since 2023.
The song comes from a trip Ponder took to Dakar, Senegal at seventeen. Over two decades later, she went back to film the video with director Fede Kortez. “In Dakar I found a brightness in the eyes of the people and an absence of heaviness in their songs,” she says. “Here, power and leadership all came in the color Black and I began to piece together the source of my own.” That’s a specific kind of insight, the idea that you can travel somewhere and recognize a version of strength you didn’t have language for at home. She calls the song a love note to the seventeen-year-old who made that trip, and to the Black diaspora more broadly: “may we always remember that we are people who can fly.”
Ponder’s path here is its own story. She left a job at the public defender’s office in Rochester, NY, to pursue music full time, a leap that paid off with her 2023 debut Some Of Us Are Brave. Eight songs moving between pop, R&B, blues, rock, and trip-hop, built around a voice that can murmur and then detonate within the same verse. “Power” sounds like the natural next step for that voice, and I’m glad to hear it again.
