For most of the '00s, Panda Bear and Animal Collective scribbled outside the lines of indie rock and made up their own rules, releasing albums that flouted expectations. Animal Collective built its buzz in the mid-2000s by arts-and-crafting album covers, wearing masks onstage, and making a ramshackle, spasmodic type of indie music that could be seen as being as childlike as a tantrum. Old album reviews abound with allusions to nursery rhymes, enchanted forests and Peter Pans.
Panda Bear himself, Noah Lennox, often sang in a dulcet choirboy voice that never seemed to age across some 26 years of releasing his solo music. In the last 13 years or so he has become the go-to for a certain type of sound in pop, his voice adding sincerity and ingenuousness to tracks for everyone from Daft Punk and Jamie xx to Solange. Yet "My Girls," Animal Collective's pop breakthrough back in 2009, was Lennox's pulsing electronic paean to the decidedly adult duties of family. Swearing on his father's grave, Lennox sang: "With a little girl, and by my spouse / I only want a proper house." Not quite the thematic fare of boys from Neverland.
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Sinister Grift, the eighth Panda Bear album, finds the now 46-year-old Lennox negotiating a bold new world: middle age. That little girl is now nearly an adult (and collaborator on the album's "Anywhere but Here"), while Lennox and his spouse separated a few years back. His roles as husband and parent now moving into the rearview, Lennox pivots toward an uncertain future any midlife father can recognize — if not always face — one of shifting relationships, receding hairlines, unfulfilled hopes, balky knees, new love, faltering memory. "I can feel the miles on my knees," he sings on "50mg," while on "Ends Meet," he voices that helpless anxiety of mortality: "Punching you in your gut / It's gonna take good care of you / you can't choose," before shrugging at the chorus: "What else can I do?"
Middle age offers up the type of uncertainty in which Lennox has always relished, even thrived in. Across his solo work, he often set up narrow constraints in which to wiggle: recording Young Prayer in the house where his father passed away, using mostly samples (to construct the early 21st century classic Person Pitch), deconstructing an acoustic guitar (on Buoys), or recasting songs for a mariachi band (on a 2024 EP). The biggest constraint? Panda Bear was largely a solo endeavor, with Lennox even reproducing everything live as a one-man band on tour, only bringing in collaborators like longtime friend/neighbor/producer Sonic Boom on later releases to assist onstage and in the studio.
Since countless indie bands took direct inspiration from him and his band (the likes of Grizzly Bear, MGMT, Passion Pit immediately spring to mind), Lennox's self-constructed limitation for Sinister Grift is a novel one: convert Panda Bear into a full-fledged indie band. Featuring contributions from all four of his AC bandmates, his daughter, Cindy Lee, lap steel player Walsh Kunkel and his new girlfriend, Spirit of the Beehive's Rivka Ravede, Panda Bear serves as frontman for Panda Bear. The album's expanded sound inverts expectations for what we expect a Panda Bear album in 2025 to sound like.
Sinister Grift is a rejuvenation that still feels exactly like Panda Bear, with a more prominent support system behind him. It also marks the first time that his Animal Collective bandmates have all appeared on a Panda Bear album. All the famous touchstones of Lennox's sound are present across the album: psychedelia, dub, minimal electronics, surf-pop, re-invigorated by a casualness suggestive of a couple of dads just jamming in the garage on the weekend. Not that you could parse if that's Avey Tare adding vocal harmonies, loping bass, or melted xylophone noise to "Ends Meet" (it's the latter). His longtime friends are there to support him, should he need it. Because Lennox is processing his feelings.
The painful sting that underpins opener "Praise" ("I'm holding on to you / my heart it bends before it breaks") gets balanced out by the kind of buoyant, jangly new indie band sound perfect for the good vibes-and-espresso of radio shows like Morning Becomes Eclectic. Lennox sings of "black thoughts back again," but pairs it with a breezy, gently-phased lilt on "Ferry Lady," his guitar (and synth trumpet from AC member Deakin) shimmering like a sunset on the Iberian Peninsula.
The first half of the album revels in such frisson, the words acutely aware of the pain of change, the uplifting music hopeful for a way forward. But the most affecting stretch of Grift happens on the back half, as the music slows down to match and amplify the words. "Venom's In" moves at a languid pace, but a chorus like "the venom's in / sick cuz it's working / bruised and it's hurting / moved by the brunt of it," can't help but convey the deep hurt of that dissolution.
Most devastating is the one-two punch of "Left in the Cold" and "Elegy for Noah Lou," setting Lennox's angelic voice as it sings "left in the cold / left to grow old" against a spare, zero-gravity musical backdrop. The haunting "Elegy for Noah Lou" makes for a poignant new peak in his catalog. Filled with little more than Lennox's voice, spindling guitar, and some ambient wisps from Geologist, it revisits the empty space and grieving process of Young Prayer 20 years later. It also contains what might be the mantra for the undaunted Panda Bear project as it ages: "Seeking as travelers do / looking, but long in the tooth / for you."
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