Watch Panda Bear’s Reliably Strange Tonight Show Performance
No matter how big Panda Bear gets, there’s always going to be a deep whiff of warehouse-DIY weirdness to everything he does. When Panda was on The Tonight Show last night, for instance, it might’ve been cool if he’d figured out a way to sing with the Roots backing him up or something like that. But that’s just not the sort of thing he does. Instead, he played “Boys Latin,” the single from his new Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper, with his regular setup: Microphone, control panel full of electronic doohickeys, screen projecting non-sequitur images behind him. And as the song dissolved into pink noise in its final seconds, the studio lights went into seizure-inducing overdrive and the film loops got extra-disturbing. None of this would be especially strange in the context of a Panda Bear show, but on late-night NBC, it was something else. Watch the performance below.
Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper is out now on Domino.