Do anything for 25 years and people start expecting certain things from you.
For Noah Lennox, those expectations include stacked vocals, soaring harmonies and innovative production. Yet, throughout his career — as Panda Bear or with his Animal Collective bandmates — friends and peers have helped him take those hallmarks and push them in new directions.
"Doing stuff with other people, the results are unpredictable," he says on a Zoom call from his home in Lisbon, Portugal, "and that is interesting to me, especially after having done this for so long."
It was in that spirit that Lennox turned to his Animal Collective bandmate and lifelong friend Josh "Deakin" Dibb for his new album, Sinister Grift. In what he calls "a full circle moment," Dibb came to Lisbon to help Lennox lay down tracks in his newly built home studio. "He was the person I started recording with a million years ago." Dibb worked with Lennox on Panda Bear's lo-fi, home-recorded debut in 1999. "There was a kind of like symmetry, or closing of the circle, having Josh be a part of it."
Yet Lennox was also intrigued by the possibilities of blending his own sound with Dibb's. They have very different musical sensibilities, with Dibb more focused on lyrics and melody, and more likely to foreground vocals. "I like when I take my thing and it gets filtered through their perspective," says Lennox, citing his work with Rusty Santos (2019's Buoys) and Sonic Boom (2011's Tomboy, 2015's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, 2022's Reset). "You sort of end up kind of in between each other a little bit in a cool way."
Sinister Grift began life after a gig offer in Madrid. This was shortly after COVID lockdowns, "and I thought it would be cool to write a whole bunch of new music for the thing," remembers Lennox. He preformed early versions of "Ends Meet," "Elegy for Noah Lou" and "Just as Well" for a festival audience who were perhaps expecting a more familiar setlist. "It didn't go very well," acknowledges Lennox. Nevertheless, he had the beginnings of his next album.
Lennox has often turned to his bandmates in Animal Collective for help on his Panda Bear albums, but this is the first time all three have been involved, albeit not all on the same track. Brian "Geologist" Weitz has "a very idiosyncratic take on making sounds," and Lennox asked him for a "sound pack of stuff" based on some prompts, and these contributions appear on "Elegy for Noah Lou."
As for Dave "Avey Tare" Portner, "On 'Ends Meet' I really wanted a noise solo on there," says Lennox. "I knew [he] would crush that, and he did about 48 hours later."
Since 2019's Buoys, Lennox and Animal Collective in general have been moving away from the busy, sampled sounds that marked many of their previous high watermarks. "We were on kind of like a maximal synthetic kick sometime in the 2010s," notes Lennox. The songs on Sinister Grift have a more stripped-down feel, giving space for Panda Bear's underrated knack for writing pop hooks to carry each tune.
Sinister Grift's title was on a long-standing list on Lennox's phone, but its meaning didn't come into focus until after the record was done. "There's a lie that we tell ourselves, that if we can plan things the right way, or if we're smart enough, or if we are careful enough, that we can avoid pain, regrets, hurting other people," Lennox notes. He pointedly says that the album is not autobiographical — "But the characters in these songs, there's pieces of me, or things I thought, or things I experienced. There's a suffering in it that's mine, but it's not telling the story of my life."
For the solo on the record's slow-burning first single, "Defense," Lennox turned to Calgary's Patrick Flegel, a.k.a. Cindy Lee, a few months before Diamond Jubilee dramatically increased Flegel's profile. The two had never met, but Flegel had stayed with Dibb in Baltimore after a show and put the whole thing in motion. "I was a big Women fan, and I've followed [Flegel's] work post-Women," says Lennox. "It was serendipitous that every time something would come up, I knew who I wanted to do it, and lucky for me, they were down to do it."
Most of the collaborations on the record — Spirit of the Beehive's Rivka Ravede also makes an appearance, and Daniel Lopatin contributed to a bonus track — were done over email, a situation Lennox is familiar with since moving to Portugual in 2004.
Asked whether he turns to friends to help him move him forward musically, Lennox is modest: "I think that's probably a consequence of it." But he quickly to cites a desire for social interaction as well, suggesting making music with friends trumps all.
"I'm not the most social guy, so having that sort of forced interaction is good for me, and I hope for other people."