Panda Bear has been added to a few music festival lineups this year, which immediately had us wondering what we would be seeing on stage from the prolific songwriter when he shows up to play his sets. Following up his last release Tomboy, one would look at the output of his singles, his guest-spots on other albums, and you’d probably expect more of the same quite logically, especially if you had Person Pitch on repeat like I did. Even his main contributions to the Centipede Hz album, Animal Collective’s latest release, had a unique feeling to them. All of it is quite varied and differently, but every time, you could point to it and debate it sonically and come up with the same answer every time: it sounds like Panda Bear.
In a new interview with Under the Radar, it turns out his work on the Tomboy album and adding Sonic Boom to the live show will only hint at what direction we’re going to see from the latest songs.
I guess it’s a little hard to say, because it’s maybe a bit premature to make a sweeping statement about how it’s going to turn out, but I’m hoping to get it into a decidedly different place than the Person Pitch stuff and the Tomboy stuff. In a way, I feel like there was, in terms of the impression of the sound, something that linked Tomboy and Person Pitch, and I’m hoping to get to a new environment with these songs, mostly because I feel like these songs warrant that change. It’s not that I was unhappy with the way the last two came out.
The article mentions a tentative album name for the next release called Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. He’s finishing it up early this year and hopes to have it out soon after.
UPDATE (2/24): the album will get a release sometime later this year on Domino Records…
