Animal Collective have never sought to operate in a linear fashion.
The group’s two decade strong catalogue touches on blissed out psych pop and distorted freak folk alike, with each new album serving to sketch out its own unique cosmology.
Pushing forwards once more, new album ‘Time Skiffs’ is – even by their own lofty standards – something of a triumph, with its unique and sense of purpose gripping the listener from the off.
A re-entrenchment of the band’s core sound – those soaring vocals, the crisp electronics, the deft left-field flourishes – it also nudges Animal Collective gently out into pastures new.
Offering further sign that the quartet remain a gleefully surprising aural experience, ‘Time Skiffs’ was promptly rewarded with some of the band’s most lavish praise in a decade.
Clash caught up with Panda Bear over Zoom, discussing his Lisbon home, potential solo projects, and the making of ‘Time Skiffs’.
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How does it feel to have ‘Time Skiffs’ out in the world?
Really good, especially because this one was a long time coming! I mean, you can imagine because of the pandemic and everything, that kind of shifted our plans a bit later. But even beyond that some of these songs were written, I think, almost three, three and a half years ago. So it definitely feels good. We were finished maybe last May, and then we were white knuckling it for eight months while we waited.
Is it a nice experience as an artist to have a little longer to live inside a project?
There are positives and negatives to it. Especially when you’re doing it remote, and you’re not pushed for time in a studio, there is a kind of energy that can result in something good. It was nice. Having all the time in the world to get the right take, we could really take our time. But the down side to it is that you had so much time you would end up second guessing yourself. You’d lay down a part, and then three days later want to change it. There’s positives and negative, and we just tried to ride the wave a little bit.
The spark for the album came from those shows in 2019 – you all work in different cities, does that make being onstage together quite special?
I feel like playing music was always kind of celebratory, or had a celebratory element in it. Sacred is perhaps too heavy-handed a word, but it’s something in that direction – it’s a special moment, for sure. It’s just great to see each other! And there’s a cycle to it, this big enthusiastic wave of energy. It’s hard to carve out time to do it, but it’s a special time when we’re together.
Each member of Animal Collective is creative in their own right, it must be fascinating for you to see what the other’s are bringing to the table each time. It lends a natural sense of evolution to the band.
I mean, I think that’s kind of the coolest thing about playing with a group of people – you’re constantly surprised by where the thing goes, and the way other people take it to places or have a point of view on the thing that’s different than your own. And then that forces you to go to places that maybe you’re uncomfortable with, or you’re not so sure about. But I find that’s also the times when you learn the most.
The initial idea for Animal Collective was that every album would be a different group. It would have a different name, be a different sort of project, be a different configuration of people. I feel like Initially, the idea was to do it more like the way jazz musicians do it, where you’re a player yourself, and you kind of join up with different groupings of people as you go. We got away from that a little bit, I’d say around the late 2000s. But it feels cool. I feel like we’re back to the original energy, where there’s just all manner of stuff happening all the time. Maybe we kind of over saturate the market, and that isn’t smart. But I feel like we kind of can’t help it at the same time. We’re just restless people creatively.
A cliche with reviews of the new record is that it’s “the band’s best since ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’”. Do you feel a kind of competition with your own catalogue, at times?
I kind of always feel that, to be honest. Not necessarily in terms of how successful it will be, but more in terms of what this thing actually is, and how fully realised it can be. I always have this benchmark that I want to push past each time, and sometimes you fall flat on your face. It’s kind of like a sports mentality… except I’m not in competition with other musicians, I’m in competition with myself.
It’s a very unified record, how do you achieve that with four totally distinct creative voices?
We don’t have formal conversations about what we’re going to do, but we do have texts going back and forth. A lot of stuff gets thrown against the wall, and at the end you can trace five or six particular ideas that run all the way through. To answer your question more concretely, although it doesn’t seem that way sometimes, we’re all kind of aligned. It’s more of a labour process. Something like ‘Strawberry Jam’ for example, I felt we were going in all kinds of different directions. With this one, though, from early on we were all pushing in the same direction.
I actually like ‘Strawberry Jam’!
I like that one too, haha! But it’s more, what I’m describing doesn’t make a record suffer. It can just be tricky to manoeuvre those delicate things.
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‘We Go Back’ made a deep impression, was that one you guys had in your locker for some time?
I actually don’t remember there being a demo for that one, which is unusual for us as we normally have pretty involved demos. Even with that first bass line – it wasn’t in 11 or 7 or whatever time signature we ended up using. But I do remember hearing that phrase, and once we linked it to the drum beat, it all came together organically. We normally have pretty developed demos these days, where there’s a clear blueprint for the songs. It’ll then be about finding the arrangement that works.
Was there a song that took a particularly long time to get right on this record?
Oh ‘Strung With Everything’ for sure. It was definitely the problem child. We did so many different versions before ending up on this final one. It was kind of trial and error!
Why do you think that was?
All songs have their own path! I think all of us at the end of the day would say whatever suits whatever is best for the song is what we want. But as you can imagine, while we’re obviously not egomaniacs, if somebody does something, and you feel like it’s not working, you’ve got to find how to say that in the right way.
Given that the record was finished 12 months ago, will your approach to live performance alter those songs? The band must have evolved in that time, surely.
I think the live versions will be pretty faithful to the recorded versions we have. ‘Time Skiffs’ was about half of the material that we wrote in the past couple of years. So there’s like a whole other group of songs that we’ve recorded. I don’t know when that one will come out, so there’ll be songs that feel like they’re in sort of the same world, but that haven’t been released yet. And I’m sure we’ll play a lot of those on tour as well.
Songs have their own space and time. It’s a lot like DJ culture, then, with unreleased material used as DJ tools.
I mean, some of the live shows that were the most impactful for me were shows where I didn’t know a lot of the material that was being played. So it can be a little bit dicey, because to get everybody in the crowd going with stuff that they don’t really know can often be a harder trick to pull off… but I feel like the payoff is bigger. I love having tracks that are like little secrets or surprises.
On a personal level, how is Lisbon? Does it feel like home?
I don’t think I’ll ever leave! I have to say the city is massively different to how it was when I moved here, but I still really like it. There’s a lot of foreign investment… meaning that we all get pushed to the outskirts of the city.
It’s always struck me as a wonderful place to make art.
I have to say one of the things that in the past few years, the only thing that really kind of took my mind off the spiralling outside… was working. I leaned into work in a way that I haven’t done in a while. And my friend, Pete – Sonic Boom – he and I made a thing. So, that should be coming out sometime this year, I hope. But I feel like I got to pump the brakes a little bit. At a certain point, I just got to kind of lay low and let the stuff come out before making stuff… but we’ll see.
So, what’s the project? An album? A mixtape?
A proper album. Pretty traditional in that way. It’s hard to define. There’s an emotional connection to the album I made called ‘Person Pitch’ because it’s sample-based, but there’s a rock ‘n’ roll vibe, too.
And finally, what does the rest of the year hold for you?
This year for me is kind of all about Animal Collective and touring and playing shows… fingers crossed that it all happens. But yeah, having done so much producing and recording the past couple of years, I kind of feel ready to do something different for a while. And I think it’ll be good for the record to tour a bunch. So that’s sort of the plan.
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‘Time Skiffs’ is out now.
Words: Robin Murray
Photo Credit: Hisham Bharoocha
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