If you are at all familiar with 2000s indie rock or early internet music culture, you’ve likely come across — or at least felt the influence of — Baltimore experimental pop band Animal Collective. Terms like “surreal,” “trippy” and “kaleidoscopic” now feel kind of overused and cliche when describing their music, but albums like Merriweather Post Pavilion or Strawberry Jam undeniably contain a delirious, effortless glee that make them an unmatched benchmark of the modern psychedelic genre.
These albums breathe with dense, sweaty synthetic textures and powerful Beach Boys-like harmonies that arouse an overwhelming and organic emotionality. This feeling is so contagious that, once you reach the climax of “In the Flowers,” you and your friends might suddenly feel compelled to wander barefoot through the evening woods while imagining yourselves as a wild pack of horses — like an animal collective, so to speak.
Over the years, individual members of Animal Collective have released solo albums, including Noah Lennox, also known as Panda Bear. It is always interesting to see how they fare in a solitary context given the band’s reputation for their collaborative, experimental spirit. Lennox’s Person Pitch is perhaps the most notable of the bunch: a diverse musical collage that could be considered the first ever chillwave album.
If you are entering Lennox’s most recent solo album Sinister Grift as someone familiar with the band at its dynamic peaks in the 2000s, you may end up feeling underwhelmed. From its opening track “Praise,” the album introduces itself as an agreeable blend of dub and reggae: timeless and welcoming in a way that could please all the generations in a single family. Lennox settles into this warm, laid-back pocket with little overt experimental ambition.
It feels like the soundtrack to the summer of a millennial dad who has just cycled through all four stages of grief, and is now spending his aimless days freewheeling between various tropical vacation spots. Occasionally, he reunites with old friends, strumming some guitar with a local band on a sun-drenched beach while quietly bearing the emotional debris of a fading mid-life crisis. It is like dad rock, if the dads in question grew up with a hipster-adjacent, psychedelic musical taste rather than ‘80s stadium anthems.
But Sinister Grift is a reminder that being conventional is not the same as being uninteresting. If Merriweather Post Pavilion invites you to lose yourself in its overwhelming electronic fever before revealing its universally catchy pop hooks, Sinister Grift is the opposite. It presents these immediate, accessible songs, only to gradually reveal its rich details in its subtle layering and emotional undertones with repeated listens.
The first leg of Sinister Grift holds onto this unassuming modesty, with some of the incredibly diverse cross-genre influences present in Person Pitch. “50mg” (with a title a bit too obvious for Animal Collective’s psychedelic reputation) leans heavily into a reggae groove, while “Ends Meet” is entirely a dub track. The city pop inspired synth accents on the chorus of “Just As Well” play surprisingly well with the reggae guitar strumming. There is much detail to dig into, such as the glitchy electronics that ripple through “Just as Well” and the flourish of horns on “Ferry Lady.”
As Sinister Grift closes out with its last four tracks, the darker emotional weight gradually floats from the background to the surface, with “Venom’s In” and “Left in the Cold” preparing the listener for the 6-minute standout “Elegy for Noah Lou.” A mostly folk-inspired, ambient track, it carries what Lennox described in an interview as a “longing...for a kind of acceptance, or a searching for love” about a child considering his mother.
All four Animal Collectivists contribute to Sinister Grift (making it the first time they have united on a solo album), but it is a distinctly Panda Bear album. He sings by himself, stripping back the hazy digital wash to put his own voice front and center. This highlights his raw singing and songwriting abilities, particularly with the earworm chorus on “Ferry Lady” — “Thought we'd be friends again / pushed to the end, we can, but we don't / the days we spent, now we don't care” — which reverberates in your mind long after the track is over.
Lennox’s lyrics are still honest and open-hearted but now harbor the kind of heartache and regret that inevitably settles into the background hum of one’s everyday existence.
Parenting and fatherhood emerge as themes, with Lennox’s daughter having a Portuguese spoken word section on “Anywhere but Here.” If “Elegy for Noah Lou” is about the child’s perspective of their parent, “Praise” is the inverse. Lennox stated the inspiration for the track came from the “realization where, no matter what the kid does, if he’s not giving you anything back...there’s always this unbreakable fire that’s driving the whole thing.” Evidently, the ethos behind Animal Collective’s “My Girls” — a rejection of material things for the simplicity of parenthood — has not faded even after 14 long years.
As the musical icons of the 2000s and 2010s settle slowly into midlife, we are seeing more and more albums like Sinister Grift that don’t satiate the same thrills of when they were at their peak. For newer or younger fans like me, this restraint could feel like a letdown. After all, with streaming, we often discover artists in their most electrifying moments, and it’s natural to crave that same energy indefinitely. Sinister Grift suggests that there are still new ways to inhabit sound, making for a rewarding but understated listen.
