One important thing I’ve learned over my past two decades as a professional music writer is that revulsion or outright hostility isn’t the worst reaction you can have to a first listen. Feelings that strong are worth exploring and interrogating and they frequently boomerang into curiosity and fascination. Sometimes, maybe even obsession.
And so having come out the other side to make a list like this, I have no problem admitting my first impression of Animal Collective upon hearing Sung Tongs in 2004: I fucking hated it. All that whooping and hollering and the cutesy imagery, it felt like a couple of counselors leading a color war cheer at one of those East Coast summer camps still using Native American imagery in the mid-2000s. Knowing the context from which they sprang didn’t really help either. A New York Times freak-folk scene explainer revealed a subculture almost painstakingly designed against my interests — a confluence of rich hippies, the arrested development of twee, problematic appropriation of indigenous cultures, and hipster irony. Oh, and somehow, the troubling, conciliatory view of R. Kelly that was endemic in indie culture for at least a decade after he was described as “scandal-ridden” in the paper of record in 2004. In the span of one paragraph, we find out that Devendra Banhart got his first name from a shady guru, his middle name from Star Wars, and that he was prone to covering “Step In The Name Of Love” in concert. To wit: “‘This is where the free dancing comes in — look, I’ll start,’ Mr. Banhart said, squirming in a controlled way, like a flower child take on break dancing.”
Taken as a whole, Animal Collective was indicative of a wave that opted out of the real world, what with its endless War On Terror and likely stolen election(s). It all seemed privileged and even willfully ignorant at times, but most of all, this all conflicted loudly with my lean towards literalism in 2004, whether it be Drive-By Truckers, The Streets, Jimmy Eat World, or Arcade Fire. My animus towards freak folk as a whole has not truly abated in the years since, and I’ll totally vouch for a lot of it, even the music Devendra Banhart was making up until “Shabop Shalom.”
But it did not take long for me to realize that, yes, this was a wave knowingly trying to opt out of the real world. And that was actually far more valuable of a response to the horrors of our times than, say, “When The President Talks To God.” As freak-folk progenitor Vashti Bunyan put it: “It’s a particularly difficult time to look at the world, and maybe right now it [sic] just easier to create your own.” It’s always a difficult time to look at the world, and in Animal Collective’s music, I didn’t hear ease or abdication of responsibility. And I was listening to Animal Collective incorrectly. Nowadays, I do hear an earnestness that can come off as embarrassing, but also a profound sadness and loss — of youth, of beauty, of the natural world, of the innocence that makes people want to hear and listen to something like “Who Could Win A Rabbit?”
For the rest of the 2000s, the world didn’t get much less difficult to look at, but the lens through which many of us did started to resemble that of Animal Collective. Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), Dave Portner (Avey Tare), Brian Weitz (Geologist) and, occasionally, Josh Dibb (Deakin) were prolific and prophetic, creating a flood of albums, EPs, remixes, audio-visual experiments, and especially solo projects that almost singlehandedly redrew the boundaries of indie rock to include everything from Brazilian and African rhythms to microhouse and psychedelic folk, all while their tie-dyed visuals and fixation on road-testing new material made them a Trojan horse for the eventual embrace of jam-band culture. Their output has been more erratic in terms of quantity and quality in the past decade or so, but it’s all the more reason to take your time revisiting one of the most exciting and confounding catalogs of the 21st century — for the sake of my sanity, we’re just going to keep it to studio albums.
12. Danse Manatee (2001)
Thankfully, this doesn’t happen all that much anymore, but throughout the 2010s, “can you believe they tricked us into liking this” was a reliable cheat code for engagement on Music Writer Twitter. And to illustrate this, posters would include a clip of Animal Collective whooping and hollering during a live performance of “We Tigers” or the “FloriDaDa” video, conflating their most abrasive work with “Banshee Beat” or “Fireworks” or “My Girls.” As with most Music Writer Twitter cheat codes, it’s a bad faith expansion of a somewhat valid point — Animal Collective’s creative peak coincided with the peak of Pitchfork’s influence, and of the many A-list bands from that era for whom that was true, they were probably the least likely to thrive in the absence of it.
Fortunately for Animal Collective, they got the most grating, tuneless stuff out of the way before they were big enough for anyone to notice — aside from the live staple “Essplode,” Danse Manatee is what Animal Collective haters think all of their music sounds like and even Pitchfork had its limitations, giving it a 3.9 that reflects its general perception amongst Animal Collective lovers… aside from Geologist, who considers this his favorite album of theirs (it is, coincidentally, the first on which he appears). Unrelated, I firmly believe that Animal Collective would crush a cover of “Endangered Love (Barbara Manatee).”
11. Centipede Hz (2012)
It’s one thing for an album to be divisive, another to be an actual dividing line between eras. In the three-and-a-half years that separate Merriweather Post Pavilion and Centipede Hz — by far the longest break between Animal Collective albums at that point — prevailing critical interests had shifted away from arty indie rock towards hip-hop, pop and R&B. Obamacore 1.0 was mutating into Obamacore 2.0, the twee optimism of the earlier term giving way to a pop culture high dudgeon. AnCo’s peers, such as Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, and Dirty Projectors, had released strong records whose initial enthusiasm masked their loosening grip on the center. And then there was Centipede Hz, not so much a flop as the burrito explosion heard ’round the world.
Putting aside Pitchfork’s memorable metaphor and its ensuing vote of non-confidence, an album as overstuffed and chaotic as Centipede Hz was well suited for this time, at least in theory. Starting with the death metal pounding on “Moonjock,” Centipede Hz is anxious and relentless throughout, which at least tempts some temptation to hear it as a commentary about “the overload of the Information Age” or however your favorite Slate thinkpiece would put it. Taken thirty seconds at a time, Centipede Hz crackles with energy and ideas and there are many impressive moments where the maximalism works in their favor — the stuttering hook on “Today’s Supernatural,” the “Brother Sport”-like coda of “Amanita.” But when every moment tries to be like that, none of them are. The sheer density of the production makes the 54 minutes of Centipede Hz feel thrice as long, and that’s not even counting the songs that are mostly memorable for tipping towards self-parody (the one about mangos, the one where they let Deakin sing). Trust me, I’ve spent the past 13 years trying to make a contrarian’s case for Centipede Hz that gets undermined every time I actually listen to it. Perhaps it’s best appreciated as an album right-sizing Animal Collective back into a more sustainable future as a cult act.
10. Painting With (2016)
Whether deep in the wilderness or at the precipice of the mainstream, Animal Collective wisely followed their own artistic compass. The unusually cool reception towards Centipede Hz did not change that, as Painting With made it clear that Animal Collective had taken none of its critiques to heart. In fact, they leaned even harder into their most derogatory stereotypes and offered themselves up as the natural heirs to Flaming Lips at their most cloying and waaaaaaacky.
During the album rollout, they claimed inspiration from cave paintings and dinosaurs. The lead single was named “FloriDada” and sounded like it was angling for a Shrek soundtrack placement (to be fair, “Peacebone” could’ve got there, too). Its video is ridiculous. Somewhere in the middle, they threw in a sample of “Wipeout.” Throughout Painting With, Avey and Panda do this thing where they’re trading off syllables within a word, like Beastie Boys at triple speed.
I won’t go so far as to say Painting With is underrated or even worthy of a 10-year reassessment. However, I will say it’s superior to its predecessor because “FloriDada” is a catchier song than anything on Centipede Hz, the album is significantly shorter, and their fixation on early Ramones set a precedent for Panda Bear’s more recent, bubblegummy solo records. That said, one of the band’s most open-minded critics described Painting With as “Animal Collective: The Ride,” and I’m not surprised that this is where a lot of people chose to jump off.
9. Campfire Songs (2003)
The purists are shook — “I thought this was an Animal Collective list, not a Campfire Songs list.” And indeed, the eponymous debut of Campfire Songs was retconned as the third Animal Collective once its personnel (Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist) solidified as the creative core. Though even more formless than Danse Manatee, it’s infinitely more welcoming, quite literally a porch jam session where all the doors are open to both human and animal friends alike (do the crickets and cicadas collect royalties?). Though mostly a curiosity on its own merits, Campfire Songs is an essential document of Animal Collective’s progression, as its wandering strums, intuitive melodies, and au naturel production sound like Panda Bear’s Young Prayer and Sung Tongs taking shape in real time.
8. Time Skiffs (2022)
7. Isn’t It Now? (2023)
By 2022, a re-appreciation of Animal Collective seemed inevitable. There was enough distance from peak backlash for the bad-faith naysayers to move on and a rising fatigue towards the post-Punisher singer-songwriters and various 90s alt-revivalists that took AnCo’s place as indie rock’s central characters. That left the hardcore evangelists and perhaps a new generation that could tap into the group’s sprawling, challenging, and often-rewarding catalog as a kind of counter-programming. Still, an actual comeback seemed like too much to ask; Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s priorities were elsewhere and I felt certain that only an Embryonic-type record could pull them out of the slump, something that dug into their darker, noisier roots and blotted out the cloying, day-glo pop that became their default mode.
So I can’t help but feel like there was a good amount of wishcasting that went into describing Time Skiffs as an, ugh, “Animal corrective.” It’s a warm, airy, and nostalgic record, “organic” despite being mostly made from synthesizers; On a good day, it is reminiscent of Feels, if only because it sounds like nothing that came after Feels. Yet, Time Skiffs isn’t just “nostalgic” in that it frequently casts its eye back towards their Avey and Panda’s youth, but “nostalgic” in being fan service. It’s “Animal Collective” as a comforting ideal rather than the restless act whose least rewarding work was still forging new paths (“Prester John” is a clear highlight, though its dubby Dead-ness was a sound that AnCo could ease into at this point). Compared to what came before, Time Skiffs was good enough to get a bump to “great,” a bummer because Isn’t It Now? did similar things in a more interesting way, whether it’s the epic origin story “Magicians From Baltimore” or the 21-minute psych-prog marathon of “Defeat.” It’s also the funkiest Animal Collective album, due in large part to the oversight of Russell Elevado, a collaborator of D’Angelo and The Roots (which leads to the question, what’s the second-funkiest Animal Collective record?).
6. Ark (2003)
There’s unease and eeriness throughout Animal Collective’s entire catalog if you know where to look, but no one would describe them as “dark,” let alone “evil.” I tend to think of their trajectory as similar to that of Sonic Youth — emerging from the murk to become avant garde ambassadors and, eventually, generational influences — which would make Ark their Bad Moon Rising. Which is to say, the last time you could describe either as a straight-up noise act as a compliment. This is why Ark (originally titled Here Comes The Indian and rebranded like so many projects during the social reckoning of 2020) is held in such high regard by Animal Collective’s most militant wing of fanatics. Though it followed Campfire Songs by only three months, Ark was meant to be viewed as the work of a completely different band; Indeed, the addition of Deakin led it to become their first project attributed to “Animal Collective.” Still, I can’t help but hear it as a continuation of Campfire Songs, the bloody, brutal “after” when someone spikes the tea and everyone heads out to the woods to act out their most vivid nightmares, naked and afraid.
5. Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (2000)
The first Animal Collective album had no idea it was just that — as the story goes, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished was intended as an Avey Tare solo release, as he played basically every instrument except for drums. Those were Noah Lennox’s contribution and Dave Portner felt that alone warranted a co-headlining role. The duo spent the next few years stress-testing their most extreme impulses and Spirit They’ve Gone is the baseline to which Animal Collective always returned; Everything that had come to define the project was already here, the clash between naturalism and noise, childhood nostalgia, and unprocessed nightmares, a melange of jam-band boosterism and non-rock influences (bossa nova, trance, dub, amongst many others).
Though the aesthetic is fully formed, Spirit They’re Gone isn’t Animal Collective fully realized, as even its stunning centerpieces “Chocolate Girl” and “Penny Dreadfuls” are beset by curious production and arrangement choices that betray a novice love for lo-fi experimentalism over what serves a song. Still, even the deconstructed cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” that appears on the reissue is crucial, a prescient nod at a future where indie rock would embrace both warped recording aesthetics and ’70s MOR pop. For all of the obsession over technology and futurism that marked pop culture debates in 2000, the sylvan Spirit They’re Gone might be the most prophetic album of that year.
4. Sung Tongs (2004)
Fast-forward about a year from my, let’s just say unpleasant, introduction to Sung Tongs. It’s the summer of 2005 and after another dull day in an Atlanta law office, I’ve returned to the converted Emory University dorm that serves as my temporary housing. After mulling over my limited options for the evening’s entertainment — drinking a few beers and watching TV, drinking a few beers and playing NCAA Football on PS2, going out and drinking a few beers — I’ve decided to drink a few beers, then lie in the grass as the sun sets and listen to Sung Tongs. At that moment, I really got what Vashti Bunyan was saying about Animal Collective and the power of escaping to a private, alternative universe when taking on the real world feels utterly impossible. I still remember this night over 20 years later.
This is, in large part, because I cannot imagine myself doing anything remotely similar to this at the age of 45. I spend about 30 minutes driving to work each morning in 2025 and nearly all of it is freeway traffic. There’s this small patch of undeveloped grassland that pops up about halfway through and every summer, I think about what it would be like to pull off at the next exit, call in sick, lay out on a blanket, and hope that it isn’t being used by the military. Maybe one day, I’ll recognize that I’ve earned such a modest escape. We all have. Listening to Sung Tongs (or making an album like Sung Tongs) is an undeniably restorative practice, not something that will directly alter the political trajectory of the day, but at least offers a vision of a better tomorrow.
3. Strawberry Jam (2007)
Strawberry Jam is an objective milestone for Animal Collective — their first album for Domino and the first where “folk” became completely inapplicable as a genre tag. From this point forward, Animal Collective were not just an A-list indie band, but an electronic one. And yet, Strawberry Jam found itself overshadowed in both the short and long term. I’m not talking about how it unwittingly stumbled into the year’s biggest rap beef by dropping on the same day as Kanye West’s Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis. On 2007 year-end lists, Strawberry Jam lagged behind Person Pitch, Panda Bear’s sampledelic masterpiece that cast a bigger influence on indie culture than any Animal Collective album. Two years later, it was cast as mere prelude to Merriweather Post Pavilion, an epoch-defining album where Animal Collective had a public stature finally equal to that of their critical appeal.
But that’s all the context of Strawberry Jam, not the content. And laying relatively low over the past two decades has ensured that it has never been subject to the countless copies and overexposure that have leached at least some of the magic out of Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion. If they weren’t a freak-folk band anymore, they were definitely still freaky; When it came time to play Late Night With Conan O’Brien, they didn’t go with the jaunty opener “Peacebone” or “Derek,” the joyous eulogy for Panda Bear’s dog. They didn’t play “Fireworks,” which would’ve been a mortal lock for 2007’s “trance-y, electro-indie, seven-minute nostalgia trip of the year,” but again, overshadowed, by LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” Instead, they made their late-night debut with “#1,” a beatless swirl of synth arpeggios and vocals that were processed to replicate the mouthfeel of Strawberry Jam‘s chopped and slopped album art.
In nearly every capacity, Animal Collective embodied the opposite of ’90s alt-rock, so I can’t see any of that as a spasm of authenticity, a way to placate hardcore fans who fretted over what amounted to their major label debut. Rather, I hear Strawberry Jam as Animal Collective’s second phase starting where their first one did on Spirit They’ve Gone, figuring out their newish instrumental roles in real time and following their most abrasive and tuneful impulses (sometimes both at the same time, as on “For Reverend Green”).
2. Feels (2005)
The hollers and drones and thumps of “Can You See The Words” were familiar, but streamlined for maximum propulsion, like an Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene song. Avey Tare’s shrieks on the chorus of “Grass” were as jarring as anything from Ark or Danse Manatee, but… it was on an actual chorus. Even as “Flesh Canoe” revisited the more abstract moments of Sung Tongs, the sharp edges and sunspots were buffed away; yYou’re meant to imagine Animal Collective in an actual recording studio, not a campsite. Blame it on spending the fall of 2005 in SEC country, but “Turn Into Something” will forever sound like “Rocky Top” if Neyland Stadium was pumped with Galaxy Gas. Though Feels was loudly celebrated upon its release, lest we forget, there were still reservations about whether Animal Collective were getting a little too normie with it.
20 years later, here’s what I’ve gathered from purely anecdotal evidence: The same music critics responsible for Merriweather Post Pavilion‘s exalted status feel as an instant classic feel like it’s too chalk of a pick for Animal Collective’s finest moment. Feels is their proper compromise, the exact midpoint between their early incarnation as a prolific, feverishly evolving outsider act and their future as indie rock royalty. “Accessible,” but not “conventional,” organic in its instrumentation yet every bit as in touch with their electronic influences as what came after. What is “Banshee Beat” but Animal Collective’s microhouse moment (with all apologies to “Visiting Friends,” which was explicitly modeled after Gas)? Couldn’t “Loch Raven” pass for an unplugged Aphex Twin lullaby? Countless indie rock bands would buy floor toms after hearing “The Purple Bottle,” but its obsession with peaks and drops has more in common spiritually with ecstatic house than earnest ho-hey music. But putting all that egghead stuff aside, no matter where I’ve lived, the seasons have always changed enough by this time of year for the autumnal glow of Feels to be right on time, and who doesn’t love an autumnal glow? They knew what they were doing with that title and they knew what they were doing with the release date — what is Feels but the most “October 17th” album ever made?
1. Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)
Even assuming that album leaks hurt an artist’s bottom line more than they help them, let’s remember the good times: Kid A, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Return To Cookie Mountain, Ys, albums that were semi-legally seized upon and raved over months before their release date, turning the actual drop into Big Events, coronations as instant classics. Merriweather Post Pavilion may be the last example of that very aughts phenomenon, which is just as well since it truly is the culmination of that decade, one that saw “indie rock” — as a genre, but more of a lifestyle — at its peak of influence.
Yes, the year of “GADPY,” a shorthand for a quintet of indie artists that lorded over 2009’s year-end lists… and Merriweather Post Pavilion was almost always the one at the top. As they tended to do, Animal Collective had been playing most of it live for months and the proper album found its way to pirating sites during the dead zone of December, when most critics are starved for next year’s promos. “[It] has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak,” Pitchfork wrote in a 9.6 review published on January 5, the day before its release. Not even one week of 2009 had passed and the AOTY race was already over.
But whenever an album so thoroughly dominates a given year, it runs the risk of being tied to that year in perpetuity, i.e., “dated” (see: “kamala IS brat”). Merriweather Post Pavilion is absolutely a foundational document of Obamacore, a concept at its lowest possible ebb in cultural purchase. Or at least the early iteration of it described by Vulture as “the outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later” (it was also described, like Animal Collective, as both earnest and cringeworthy).
Think wedding videos set to “My Girls,” Hipster Runoff semi-ironically quoting lyrics from “Bluish,” the bouncy-house glee of “Lion In A Coma.” Adobe slabs, things of that nature. Ben H. Allen’s super-saturated, bottom heavy production was every bit as essential to Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest one year later, which is why you also heard it applied to uber-early 2k10 buzz bands like Cults, Youth Lagoon, Washed Out, and Walk The Moon (on the album before “Shut Up And Dance”).
Or, these were the last days of pre-poptimism, where internet music conversation revolved around Bradford Cox, Panda Bear, and Grizzly Bear, and why not? Beyond Taylor Swift’s Fearless, 2009’s best-selling albums included a Kings Of Leon record that actually was released the previous September, Susan Boyle, Andrea Boccelli, a Hannah Montana soundtrack, Michael Jackson’s posthumous Number Ones collection, and truly awful Eminem and Jay-Z blockbusters. You could even argue that Merriweather Post Pavilion‘s reign was a true “recession indicator,” that 2009 was especially suited for small-ball superstars.
If this clouds anyone’s appreciation of Merriweather Post Pavilion, I don’t blame you. Though Feels has recently been inducted into Apple Music’s “Essential Album” category upon its reissue, Merriweather Post Pavilion had long been the sole AnCo LP to get that designation. It has a perfect five-star ranking on AllMusic, again, the only of its kind for the band. It is, by an insurmountable margin, their best-selling record. In so many ways, Merriweather Post Pavilion is the objective peak of Animal Collective’s career, to the point where calling it their best record feels redundant or dull, even if you think it’s true.
But these are only considerations that hold weight when I’m not actually listening to it. Like Kid A, like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Merriweather Post Pavilion is an album that I don’t revisit all that often; It’s one I have committed to memory at this point and thus, there’s a lesser utility in giving that a spin than, say, Ark, which I’m still trying to wrap my head around 20 years after the fact. A primary goal of this project was to have something other than Merriweather Post Pavilion at the top and I would’ve gotten away with it had I not actually listened to it while making the list.
And when the drums of “In The Flowers” come in… all of those musicological pretensions drop away and I remember exactly what it was like to hear a cultural shift in real time. This was Animal Collective calling their shot, right away — everything about it is so focused, so determined, so intentional, unlocking a level of extroversion that was inconceivable even on their best work. The title, a reference to their native Baltimore’s biggest outdoor amphitheatre, said it all.
Merriweather Post Pavilion may appear inevitable in hindsight, but with 16 years of distance, I’m more struck by just how weird it is even compared to its GADPY peers. “Heads Will Roll” and “1901” were done up for the iPod Nano era (indeed, the fuchsia one featured Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix in ads), but still in an understandable lineage of spiky, synth-pop rock. For all its harmonic razzle-dazzle, “Two Weeks” follows a fairly conventional pop structure and even “Stillness Is The Move” was modeled after Mariah Carey (and sidelined Dave Longstreth’s vocals, by far the most divisive aspect of Dirty Projectors). These all could have been hits at any time in the past 30 years and it’s easy to imagine each of them being played live.
While the hook of “My Girls” is undeniable, this is a song that’s impossible to play on a piano or acoustic guitar. Also, there’s about a minute or so of zero-gravity buildup. “Daily Routine” betrays Allen’s roots in booming hip-hop, synths have never sounded more like a bubble bath than on “Bluish,” the dubbed-out ballad “No More Runnin” remains underappreciated perhaps because it’s followed immediately by “Brother Sport”… I mean, it sounds like Brazilian pop, it sounds like a World Cup chant, it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Or, really, since. The raw elements of Merriweather Post Pavilion are every bit as idiosyncratic and outré as anything else from their early career and the fact that they were integrated into a no-skip, end-to-end collection of songs makes it even more impressive, not less. The fact that any of this passed for “normie,” Urban Outfitters-approved mass appeal is only a testament to how much Animal Collective shaped pop culture throughout the 2000s, not the other way around.
