An amply revered figure for more than two decades of resolute and passionate work, Noah Lennox has been surveying a path that, while being permeable to advances and transformations within music throughout those years, never subdued before those, reclaiming their most valuable signals to sculpt them into new shapes of songs never heard before.
As part of Animal Collective and in a period of exuberant and freewheeling creativity, he subverted the rulebook of this century’s pop music, imprinted on such classics as ‘Sung Tongs’, ‘Feels’ or ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’, to continue rewriting that overarching canon through a deeply personal lens as Panda Bear. After his (relatively) obscure self titled debut and the disarming and raw lyricism and wonder of ‘Young Prayer’, Lennon gifted us the acclaimed masterstroke of ‘Person Pitch’. A defining landmark both for his career and many that followed on his heels, ‘Person Pitch’ experimented with decades and cartographies of the collective consciousness, from 60’s psychedelic pop to dub’s gamble with space, from sampling tactics to flok’s purity, from shadows to light, to transform them into songs that feel both memorable and expansive. An adventurous mindset that would be continuously transmuted in his own language through records like ‘Tomboy’ or ‘Panda Bear Fears the Grim Reaper’. In parallel and within that same panoramic mindframe that thrives on music outside of genre, Lennox collaborated with disparate visionaries such as Daft Punk, Solange, Dean Blunt or Paramore, in an honest and bold process of synergy.
Connected to the Domino powerhouse since 2014, Lennox arrives in a state of grace to his seventh album as Panda Bear, five years after ‘Buoys’ and with a blessed collaborative album with Peter Kember aka Sonic Boom called ‘Reset’ mediating that trajectory. ‘Sinister Grift’, recorded at his own patient rhythm in Lisbon with his Animal Collective companion Josh “Deakin” Dibb, features the precious collaborations of Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede, Maria Reis and, for the first time ever in a Panda Bear album, all members of Animal Collective. A new piece of this fascinating mosaic, ‘Sinister Grift’ is like an AOR dream as we could never have imagined, but that in its warmth and freewill feels strangely familiar, out of time, through ten songs that for sure will inhabit our future collective memory.
Taking the ‘Sinister Grift’ show on the road, Panda Bear will present for the first time on tour with a full backing band with Lennox on vocals and electric guitar, Tim Koh on electric bass, Rivka Ravede on backing vocals and electronics, Maria Reis on backing vocals and keyboards and Tomé Silva on drums.
