About Animal Collective
Animal Collective is an American experimental pop band formed in Baltimore, Maryland. Its members consist of Avey Tare , Panda Bear , Geologist , and Deakin . The band's work is characterized by an eclectic exploration of styles, including psychedelia, freak folk, noise, and electronica, with the use of elements such as loops, drones, sampling, vocal harmonies, and sound collage. AllMusic's Fred Thomas suggests that the group "defined the face of independent experimental rock during the 2000s and 2010s."
The band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age. In 1999, they established the record label Paw Tracks, issuing what is now considered their debut album, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished , as well as work by other artists. The band's 2007 album Strawberry Jam was their first to chart on the Billboard 200. Their 2009 follow-up Merriweather Post Pavilion was the band's most commercially successful album, reaching #13 on the US chart; its reverb-heavy psychedelic pop sound proved highly influential to independent music of the subsequent decade.
Records released under the name "Animal Collective" may include contributions from any or all of its members. Evolving from early collaborations between Lennox and Portner, the collective was not officially established until all four members came together for the album currently titled Ark, which was originally titled Here Comes the Indian . Most prior collaborations between the band members were then retroactively classified under Animal Collective's discography. In the case of Dibb, who often takes breaks from recording and performing with the band, his time off does not constitute full leave.
Animal Collective grew out of childhood friendships in Baltimore County. Noah Lennox and Josh Dibb met in the second grade at the Waldorf School of Baltimore and became good friends. After the eighth grade, Lennox went away to a Waldorf high school in Pennsylvania, while Dibb enrolled at The Park School of Baltimore, where David Portner had studied since grade school. In 1993, Brian Weitz moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore County and began attending Park as well, becoming friends with Portner. According to Lennox, they attended "progressive" schools that emphasized creativity, imagination and artistic self-expression as part of "a complete kind of education". Weitz and Portner started playing music together at the age of fifteen because of their shared love of the band Pavement and horror movies. Their musical range included cover songs by Pavement and The Cure as well as the songs "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe and "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks.
When Portner and Weitz met Dibb later in high school, they started an indie rock band called Automine with schoolmates Brendan Fowler and David Shpritz, being the only ones they knew who wrote their own songs. "We set up a show with four bands—bands that were different formations of us", Portner remembered in an interview with Baltimore City Paper. At that time, the group did not have any contact with the music scene in Baltimore and "was more about the back porch." In 1995, Automine self-released their first and only record, the 7-inch-single Paddington Band. Around that time, they also had their first experiences with psychedelic drugs like LSD and started to improvise while playing music.
We had never heard so-called experimental music at the time, we didn't know that people made music with textures and pure sound. So we started doing that ourselves in high school, walls of drones with guitars and delay pedals and us screaming into mics.
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