For as confident as Dave Portner and Noah Lennox sound on Sung Tongs, the path to the record may very well have been the most trying time for Animal Collective.“We were a little bit at odds,” Lennox (aka Panda Bear) said of the year leading up to the revered acoustic pivot for the band, which turned 20 earlier this year.
“We were hitting it pretty hard.On the Ark tours, the van kept breaking down, and we had to spend a lot of money to fix it up.” Everyone in Animal Collective was at either a major inflection or breaking point — Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) found himself going through a hard time emotionally on tour and chose to step away from the band to figure out his place musically.
Brian Weitz (aka Geologist) also decided to pause his AnCo activity to attend grad school in Tucson.Portner (aka Avey Tare) had just gotten fired from his job at the influential Manhattan record store Other Music, and the building where he shared an apartment with Black Dice’s Eric Copeland caught fire right before the tour.
On top of all that, Lennox’s father had just passed away.“It was a really tough time,” Lennox continues.
“Maybe something was gonna have to change.” After the band returned from that tour, they recorded the material for Ark together, minus the vocals, and then decided to take a break as a four-piece.They went back into the practice space shortly after, but nothing that came from those sessions was taking.
Shortly after, Lennox decided to focus on making his solo record Young Prayer, made as a response to his father’s passing, and wanting some time to himself.It was the first of many times where the right move for Animal Collective was a brief breather away from their characteristic relentless reinvention, giving time for self-exploration that could pave the way for a group reset.
“It was kind of a regular cycle we use to keep going,” Portner says of that time.“It was coming back to ‘What’s going on?’ vibes.
Lots of early...