Panda Bear’s new album ‘Sinister Grift’ navigates center age : NPR

For many of the ’00s, Panda Bear and Animal Collective scribbled outdoors the strains of indie rock and made up their very own guidelines, releasing albums that flouted expectations. Animal Collective constructed its buzz within the mid-2000s by arts–and–crafting album covers, carrying masks onstage, and making a ramshackle, spasmodic kind of indie music that may very well be seen as being as childlike as a tantrum. Previous album evaluations abound with allusions to nursery rhymes, enchanted forests and Peter Pans.

Panda Bear himself, Noah Lennox, usually sang in a dulcet choirboy voice that by no means appeared to age throughout some 26 years of releasing his solo music. Within the final 13 years or so he has grow to be the go-to for a sure kind of sound in pop, his voice including sincerity and ingenuousness to tracks for everybody from Daft Punk and Jamie xx to Solange. But “My Ladies,” Animal Collective’s pop breakthrough again in 2009, was Lennox’s pulsing digital paean to the decidedly grownup duties of household. Swearing on his father’s grave, Lennox sang: “With a bit woman, and by my partner / I solely desire a correct home.” Not fairly the thematic fare of boys from Neverland.

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Sinister Grift, the eighth Panda Bear album, finds the now 46-year-old Lennox negotiating a daring new world: center age. That little woman is now practically an grownup (and collaborator on the album’s “Wherever however Right here”), whereas Lennox and his partner separated just a few years again. His roles as husband and mother or father now shifting into the rearview, Lennox pivots towards an unsure future any midlife father can acknowledge — if not all the time face — one in every of shifting relationships, receding hairlines, unfulfilled hopes, balky knees, new love, faltering reminiscence. “I can really feel the miles on my knees,” he sings on “50mg,” whereas on “Ends Meet,” he voices that helpless nervousness of mortality: “Punching you in your intestine / It is gonna take excellent care of you / you possibly can’t select,” earlier than shrugging on the refrain: “What else can I do?”

Center age provides up the kind of uncertainty through which Lennox has all the time relished, even thrived in. Throughout his solo work, he usually arrange slim constraints through which to wiggle: recording Younger Prayer in the home the place his father handed away, utilizing largely samples (to assemble the early twenty first century traditional Individual Pitch), deconstructing an acoustic guitar (on Buoys), or recasting songs for a mariachi band (on a 2024 EP). The largest constraint? Panda Bear was largely a solo endeavor, with Lennox even reproducing the whole lot stay as a one-man band on tour, solely bringing in collaborators like longtime buddy/neighbor/producer Sonic Increase on later releases to help onstage and within the studio.

Since numerous indie bands took direct inspiration from him and his band (the likes of Grizzly Bear, MGMT, Ardour Pit instantly spring to thoughts), Lennox’s self-constructed limitation for Sinister Grift is a novel one: convert Panda Bear right into a full-fledged indie band. That includes contributions from all 4 of his AC bandmates, his daughter, Cindy Lee, lap metal participant Walsh Kunkel and his new girlfriend, Spirit of the Beehive‘s Rivka Ravede, Panda Bear serves as frontman for Panda Bear. The album’s expanded sound inverts expectations for what we count on a Panda Bear album in 2025 to sound like.

Sinister Grift is a rejuvenation that also feels precisely like Panda Bear, with a extra outstanding assist system behind him. It additionally marks the primary time that his Animal Collective bandmates have all appeared on a Panda Bear album. All of the well-known touchstones of Lennox’s sound are current throughout the album: psychedelia, dub, minimal electronics, surf-pop, re-invigorated by a casualness suggestive of a few dads simply jamming within the storage on the weekend. Not that you would parse if that is Avey Tare including vocal harmonies, loping bass, or melted xylophone noise to “Ends Meet” (it is the latter). His longtime mates are there to assist him, ought to he want it. As a result of Lennox is processing his emotions.

The painful sting that underpins opener “Reward” (“I am holding on to you / my coronary heart it bends earlier than it breaks”) will get balanced out by the type of buoyant, jangly new indie band sound excellent for the nice vibes-and-espresso of radio reveals like Morning Turns into Eclectic. Lennox sings of “black ideas again once more,” however pairs it with a breezy, gently-phased lilt on “Ferry Woman,” his guitar (and synth trumpet from AC member Deakin) shimmering like a sundown on the Iberian Peninsula.

The primary half of the album revels in such frisson, the phrases aware of the ache of change, the uplifting music longing for a approach ahead. However probably the most affecting stretch of Grift occurs on the again half, because the music slows right down to match and amplify the phrases. “Venom’s In” strikes at a languid tempo, however a refrain like “the venom’s in / sick cuz it is working / bruised and it is hurting / moved by the brunt of it,” can not help however convey the deep harm of that dissolution.

Most devastating is the one-two punch of “Left within the Chilly” and “Elegy for Noah Lou,” setting Lennox’s angelic voice because it sings “left within the chilly / left to develop outdated” in opposition to a spare, zero-gravity musical backdrop. The haunting “Elegy for Noah Lou” makes for a poignant new peak in his catalog. Crammed with little greater than Lennox’s voice, spindling guitar, and a few ambient wisps from Geologist, it revisits the empty area and grieving means of Younger Prayer 20 years later. It additionally comprises what is perhaps the mantra for the undaunted Panda Bear venture because it ages: “Looking for as vacationers do / wanting, however lengthy within the tooth / for you.”