Panda Bear Discusses “Skeletal” New Solo Material
Noah Lennox has been on tour for the past year in support of Animal Collective’s latest album, Painting With, and he’s also been hard at work on new Panda Bear solo material, as he talked about in a recent interview with The Missoulian. When he talked to the Montana newspaper, he had apparently wrapped up his Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper follow-up “about four hours ago.” He wrote the songs during the Painting With tour and recorded them primarily at home in Lisbon.
It’s unclear whether the new material will be turned into an EP or an album — there are five songs that stretch out over 30 minutes — but he did talk a bit about what it’s going to sound like: “They feel really kind of simple to me. Really basic in a way, almost like there’s sections of the songs missing. But that’s something I like about dub music, for example,” Lennox said, noting that the “skeletal” nature of the songs is what ties them all together.
“[I] wanted the singing to sound pretty live,” he also said. “Sometimes there’s harmony parts in there and there’s stuff that’s been stacked, but I tried to gel all the voices together so it kind of sounds like one mass.”
Apparently he hadn’t talked to his label about the release yet at the time of the interview. Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper was released in early 2015 and he followed that up with the Crosswords EP later that summer.