Last night, Panda Bear got a shot in the ass.
He was about to play the first show of a sold-out, two-day stand at the 930 Club, a Washington, D.C. room so legendary it houses its own museum of LPs and CDs by almost every band that’s performed there since 1980, a real-time map of musical evolution. It was the ninth night of a two-week run with Toro y Moi, the first stateside Panda Bear tour in nearly six years.
But Noah Lennox—the singer and multi-instrumentalist known for a quarter-century as Panda Bear, whose angelic tone and giddy yawp helped define the generational sound of one of this century’s defining groups, Animal Collective—had started the tour sick. Battered by a brutal East Coast cold snap, his entire band, the first one he’s ever put together as a solo artist, had been volleying a bug back and forth. Lennox’s longtime sound engineer, Chris Freeman, had spent days shuffling around in a barely-there daze, issuing dispatches about what might be the flu from behind an N95.
For several days, Lennox could feel himself working harder and harder to hit his high notes, forcing his throat to cooperate. So for the first time ever, after 25 years of recording and touring, Lennox, 46, summoned the club’s on-call rock doctor to his dressing room. “I started stressing out that I was going to push it too hard, then maybe lose my voice for the rest of the tour, maybe cause some permanent damage,” Lennox says. “I didn’t want to have to cancel anything. It still feels pretty good.”
It’s less than forty-eight hours after the steroid injection; he’s sitting in the beige and brown rear lounge of his tour bus. The vocal cloudiness has cleared. I’m still surprised to hear him say he feels good: During the second show at the 930, the day after he took the shot, his curving falsetto, a career-long signature, dipped into a sandpaper growl I’ve rarely heard from him. Whenever it happened, he’d swipe at the strings of his black-and-white Fender, a lash of treble cutting through the room like a scowl. He chuckles softly when I mention it later.
“I was blowing off some steam last night. It was a stressful couple of days,” he admits, ticking off the reasons why—a bus that broke down en route from Montreal, a rented van with disco lights that would not turn off during an overnight drive to Boston, a second tour bus where nothing quite worked like the first. There was also the sickness, the pressure of leading a band for the first time ever, a full day of press appearances in New York, and, perhaps most crucially, a Tiny Desk Concert in D.C. on the morning of that second show. “That was hanging over me the whole time,” he admits. “So I had to blow off some steam. I had to get sloppy.”
The set, the sloppiness, the sandpaper: None of it did Lennox many favors with the crowd—in D.C. or at many other stops along the tour. Though Toro y Moi and Panda Bear were billed as co-headliners, much of the crammed club often seemed only to acknowledge the quartet at best, clapping politely before returning to social chatter. “We’re opening in everything but name,” he agrees with me after I accidentally refer to his opening set. “It feels like we’re opening, but I expected there to be more audience crossover. It’s like 90 to 10—no, 95 to 5. It is an instructive lesson, at least.”
The tour was Toro y Moi founder Chaz Bundick’s idea. When Bundick was a sophomore at the University of South Carolina, he and his drummer, Andy Woodward, drove five hours north to Charlottesville to see Animal Collective for the first time; it remains one of the most transformative gigs of the singer’s life. They now share a booking agent. At a festival in Mexico City in November 2023, Bundick made the case directly to Lennox that they share a bill.
“I’m an AnCo bro,” Bundick tells me, laughing. “I gushed a little bit, told him how much of a hardcore fan I am, that I am a believer in his music. I let him know that we’re coming from similar tribes.”
This is the essential paradox of Panda Bear and, to some extent, Animal Collective in 2025: Since 2000, Lennox has been integral to at least six albums widely regarded as some of the most audacious statements by musicians of his generation. From 2004 until 2009, Animal Collective released four straight albums that redrew the lines between pop and experimental music; during that stretch, Lennox also released 2007’s Person Pitch, a solo album that reimagined the possibilities of singing over samples that had been twisted and woven into uncanny shapes. He subsequently emerged as a vital collaborator to bona fide stars and iconoclasts alike—Daft Punk, Solange Knowles, Dean Blunt, to name a few.
But those albums are now influential touchstones nearing or past their 20-year anniversaries. Lennox’s slot on this tour can feel, then, like a nod to a lineage steadily fading into the rear-view, as if Panda Bear—and, by extension, Animal Collective—is a test case for audiences full of people who may have been only toddlers when he released his landmarks. Is post-millennial indie rock ready to become … classic rock? “There aren’t a lot of American bands that are really shaking the sonic landscape, even now,” Bundick says. “AnCo were holding it down for a while.”
Bundick is overstating his case, I think, but his use of the past tense is crucial—they, to some, were holding it down. But they have remained unapologetically restless, with four members weaving an intricate web of solo releases while trying something distinct on every Animal Collective album since that golden era. Their most recent LP, 2023’s Isn’t It Now?, leaned into and against their jam-band-on-the-fringe allure. It sounded as vital as almost anything they’d ever made.
But age and life come for us all, and in the six years since his most recent solo album, 2019’s Buoys, Lennox’s circumstances have changed dramatically: He divorced Fernanda Pereira, the woman he moved to Lisbon for in 2004, on the heels of a global pandemic. Both of his children, Nadja and Jamie, have become teenagers. He started a duo with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember, a longtime musical inspiration who is perhaps his closest friend in Portugal, and finally opened a studio of his own beneath the clothing shop Pereira once ran upstairs. He now lives in Lisbon with his girlfriend of two years, Spirit of the Beehive singer Rivka Ravede.
These changes inform Sinister Grift, maybe the most pellucid and poignant album of Lennox’s career. On 10 songs, he glances over his shoulder at the wreckage of a relationship and turns, tentatively, ahead. If it sometimes sounds like classic Panda Bear, with its refracted vocals and skittering rhythms, it feels like current Panda Bear, a middle-aged man glad to have crossed through his crisis.
“I had a real rough couple of years, and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out,” he says. “I’ve had, like, suicide thoughts before, but never to a planned degree like I had this time. I knew how I was going to do it. It got pretty dark.”
Lennox has always had a forever-young face, a perfect shock of black hair sweeping across wide aquamarine eyes. There are strands of gray there now and a little thinning at the crown, the bags under his eyes made heavy by tour and this lingering cold. He laughs nervously, then grins. “My friends tell me I seem really happy these days. I don’t think I have enough distance from this big thing in my life to feel carefree about anything yet,” he says. “Maybe I’ll be able to appreciate feeling that way … soon?”
Less than five minutes after that second set in D.C. ends, Lennox races backstage, coiling audio cables and helping drummer Tomé Silva collapse hi-hat stands and pack road cases. The band travels light, with very little gear apart from a few pedals and keyboards. Sweat drips down his face; he smiles as he passes and pats me on the stomach, a load clearly off his shoulders.
Before Toro y Moi even takes the stage, most of Panda Bear’s band has climbed aboard his tour bus, which sits rumbling a few feet from the venue. They tuck into couches alongside Josh Dibb, or Deakin, and Brian Weitz, or Geologist, two members of Animal Collective who live nearby. Lennox tells me he hasn’t seen them together in a year, so this is a happy collision of two worlds. Folks pass around thin slices of pizza, a few bottles of Modelo, and a bowl packed with potent D.C. weed. Lennox eases into a couch, telling his new bandmates about the time he missed the Grammys after Weitz ribs him about it (he was working, OK?) and talking to Dibb about childhood friends back in Baltimore.
After Dibb and Weitz leave, Lennox and Danny Perez—a video artist and lighting designer who has toured with Panda Bear since Person Pitch was released—launch into a series of spirited debates, pitting one movie star against another (Patrick Swayze, or Kurt Russell?). Ebullient, anxious, and hilarious, Perez was part of the same wildly exploratory New York scene as Animal Collective, although when they first met, twenty-five-years ago, it was in Tennessee, when Perez was on the road selling merch for Black Dice. Lennox cracks up at almost everything Perez says, though he says he’s heard every story at least a half-dozen times. Perez eventually wins the Swayze/Russell battle royale by proclaiming, rightly, “Patrick Swayze is fucking dead, and Kurt Russell is still fucking acting.”
Lennox figures out how to play movies from his phone on one of the TVs in the bus’s front lounge, so he begins streaming the 2024 remake of Swayze’s Road House. “Wait, is that really Post Malone?” Lennox says, cocking an eyebrow during an early fight scene. “I like Posty.” Still riding a steroid high, he proceeds to watch the whole movie, occasionally repeating the best bits with Perez. He stays up until the bus pushes off the D.C. streets at 4 a.m., bound for North Carolina, then climbs into a bunk below mine.
I am here in part because, despite being an ardent fan of Animal Collective and Panda Bear for two decades, I still feel like I know only slightly more about his background than I did in 2005. I’m not alone in this, either. Both Jessica Pratt and DJ Python—two longtime listeners who have known him for years, people I speak to at Lennox’s suggestion—tell me they’re still working, happily, to figure him out. A few others tell me they can’t believe he’s letting me, or anyone, hitch a ride on his bus, in a bunk above his. I reckon Lennox thinks it may be helpful to open up about a rather difficult midlife transition; I also understand that he’d probably like to sell a few more records.
“All my dreams came true a long time ago,” he tells me soon after that Road House night. “But I feel like I have something to prove all the time. Maybe it’s pressure that I put on myself— but I feel like I’m always fighting to stay alive, somehow.”
Noah Lennox knew how to play music before he knew how to read.
As a kid growing up in the tree-lined Baltimore suburb of Roland Park, he attended a Waldorf school, an educational lineage established by the Austrian writer, philosopher, and quasi-theologian Rudolf Steiner a century ago. His father, Dennis, was a surgeon; his mother, Judith, was a stay-at-home parent who, Lennox says, would have liked to be a ballerina.
“There was a lot of drawing, a lot of painting, music all the time. There was a dance that Steiner created called eurhythmy, so there was a movement class,” he says. “And he thought it would be good for kids not to know how to read for a while, so they stayed in this dream world of imagination for as long as possible”—which, for Lennox, meant third grade.
Around the same time, Lennox finally heard music that captivated him. His father had volunteered to work as a staff doctor at Mondamin, a lakeside summer camp in North Carolina’s low-slung mountains, so that his three children—Matt, Noah, Allison—could go. Lennox was walking along a trail when he heard The Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger” blaring from another cabin, the sound bent slightly by walls and distance. When I ask him when he first fell in love with sound, this is the moment he cites; he once called The Police “my favorite band” for the same reason.
That was also the year he met Josh Dibb. The son of an academic earning his doctorate at Johns Hopkins and an empathetic mother who had ridden the end of the ’60s into a lifetime of breathwork and spirituality, Dibb was initially home-schooled. But at second grade’s end, when he realized he was missing out on proper schoolkid socialization and requested a change, his parents also enrolled him at the Waldorf School of Baltimore. In a class of 18, Lennox and Dibb became near-instant friends.
“He struck me as special—a generic word to use, but he had these very attractive qualities,” says Dibb. “Good at athletics, very smart, already evidence of being creative. He was very gifted at anything physical, and I had two left feet.”
Lennox’s early enthusiasm for the outdoors soon ceded ground to his growing interest in music. He started watching as many MTV2 music videos as SportsCenter recaps; recognizing their kids’ musical interests, his parents bought Lennox and his siblings a Tascam 488 8-track and a Korg synthesizer. “Now being a parent, I see it like when I bought my son a surfboard recently, because I could see he was kind of into it. I thought it would be good for him, and the Tascam was that for me,” Lennox says. “I was the one who got into it the most.”
Dibb remembers the change as almost instantaneous. They had both taken music lessons at Waldorf and played cello, but they soon recognized they could toss out those instructions with the help of the 8-track. Holed up in the Lennox house, a sprawling old Victorian with a cupola at the top, they retuned their guitars intuitively and began making music together. Lennox would capture Korg sequences with the 8-track; they’d record peculiar voices and curious melodies, trying to, as Lennox remembers it, “just make each other laugh. Like we still do.”
The budding practice shifted suddenly when high school began. Lennox’s older brother, Matt, had already headed two hours northeast to a Waldorf school in Pennsylvania that also offered high school. Lennox followed him there. But the hyperactive and playful teenager—at the time, a self-described “smart aleck”—soon receded. He simply wasn’t ready to be alone, without his family or trustworthy friends.
“It feels like when I left the nest, the sense you have when you’re young and being protected. I went really inward,” he says, fiddling with the buttons of an oversized brown button-up with a small “Fucking Awesome” patch stitched to its front pocket. “I come from a long line of depressive people, and I became a real depressed guy.”
Dibb had wanted to ship off to school in Pennsylvania, too, but his mom forbade it, recognizing that it would be “destabilizing at that age,” he remembers. So he helped Lennox deal with his nascent depression, staying up late to let him vent by phone or exchanging letters across state lines. Relief truly came on the weekends, when Lennox would hop in the car alongside his brother to go back home. He hadn’t taken the Tascam with him, but he did take a guitar. He’d record his new songs back in Baltimore, then call Dibb over to listen. His friend heard something.
“He’d say, ‘Check this out,’ and he’d play four songs he’d just recorded. It was ‘Jesus Christ, that’s incredible,’” Dibb says. He tells me about listening to Lennox’s 2011 album, Tomboy, for the first time in years after that second D.C. show. He wondered anew what else had actually ever sounded quite like it, but he came up short. The feeling was familiar.
“If I went back and heard the demos from 13 or 14, I’d probably be like, ‘OK, I hear the Beastie Boys, The Orb, you know?’” Dibb continues “But pretty soon, it started being something else—none of those things.”
At his new school in Baltimore, Dibb made more friends who were writing songs, playing music, flirting with bands of their own. He knew Dave Portner through high-school theater, then asked if he could borrow the Moog that Portner’s band had salvaged for $50 to show his friend, Noah, the next time he drove down from boarding school. Dibb eventually brought in a tape of their music, then joined Automine, the slanted and plaintive indie-rock quartet Portner had started with another classmate, Brian Weitz.
They all petitioned their Baltimore school to sponsor a rock concert they dubbed Gold Soundz, an inevitable nod to Pavement. Dibb pulled double duty, playing with Weitz and Portner in Automine and with Lennox in a band called The Cartels. Weitz reckons that the idea for Animal Collective—a committed but free-range band, where members came and went as schedules and interests allowed—was seeded in that moment.
“We were very insular,” Weitz tells me. “We would put on these shows, and every band included different versions of us and our friends. That’s how we learned to be Animal Collective.”
But it took years for a true friendship with Lennox—still stuck in the doldrums of boarding school, struggling with his first years of depression—to form. “Noah was the one who came and didn’t speak, did not talk at all,” Weitz says. “A girl we went to high school with came to one of those shows and dubbed him ‘the mysterious stranger,’ because he would sit on the couch and not say a single word.”
Before Lennox and Dibb graduated from their respective schools, they had decided together to defer college for a year, so as to rendezvous back in Baltimore and resume recording. Starting that summer of 1997, they worked odd jobs to afford recording gear. Lennox clocked in at a bagel shop, where a coworker passed him a mind-bending mixtape that included songs by Sun City Girls, Fuck, and Third Eye Foundation. They played in their parents’ homes and their first apartments, often with Portner and Weitz, who were still in high school. The way Lennox describes Portner, now better known as Animal Collective’s Avey Tare, echoes the way people like Weitz speak about Lennox himself. “We were both really shy, didn’t say much to each other,” Lennox says. “We connected musically first, then filled in the gaps.”
The problems of boarding school simply shapeshifted when Lennox eventually headed to Boston University in 1998. He made friends easily this time, but he’d never written a paper in high school. He put intense academic pressure on himself, aware that a theology degree would be hard to turn into a career. After two years, he had a fight with a roommate that he didn’t know how to resolve. His mom visited, saw that her son was struggling, and took him home.
“I just lost it, freaked out. I was just crying all the time, some kind of a breakdown,” he says, slowly. “I went on antidepressants, went to New York to be with my girlfriend, and never went back.”
That became the turning point. A gaggle of Baltimore friends found themselves living together in Manhattan and Brooklyn just as the city’s inchoate experimental music scene was morphing into something thrilling. Pastoral psychedelia, refracted electronica, and assaultive noise could share spaces, bills, even songs. Lennox worked one gig as a nude model for the School of Visual Arts, then, thanks to a hookup from Portner, found the real college he’d been craving—a job at Other Music, the multi-scene-shaping record store just below the Astor Place subway stop.
“When you were on the sales floor, you were really on—talking about records all day, playing stuff for people, telling them what something sounded like,” says Josh Madell, an Other Music founder. “That wasn’t his personality, so he would lurk in the back—kind of shy, kind of sweet, liked to joke around.”
Madell remembers how Lennox loved to sing along to Guns N’ Roses and play Oh, Inverted World, The Shins’ just-out debut, while working mail order and data entry. But for Lennox, the actual value of the job came from what everyone else spun. “They were just some of the heaviest music people I’ve ever known in my life. They helped me develop a vocabulary for music,” he says, naming a half-dozen staff members, what they loved, and what they taught him. “Duane Harriott was the employee I was always trying to impress—an amazing DJ who was not super genre-specific. I thought my music would be proper good, if I could impress him.”
Those new sounds began to influence the music Lennox and his roommates were making in their off hours under various names. Weitz tells me about the era they still call the “Prince Street Summer,” when they’d rendezvous after work on that SoHo street and improvise late into the night. They played so much music that, even after Lennox lost eight hours of recordings when his car was broken into, they still had plenty of music to release, even if they had little else. “There were a lot of knife hits that summer,” Weitz remembers. “None of us had a lot of money, so there was a lot of scraping resin out of bowls.”
The name Animal Collective eventually became the umbrella for these buds from Baltimore, a decision Fat Cat Records imposed on them when they signed a deal. That is how unruly and unfettered that moment felt—all possibility, no horizon, very little use even for an actual name. “You don’t see Animal Collective and Black Dice in Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Perez tells me at one point. “Noah put it best to me when he said that, even in the early ’00s in New York, we were the weirdos amongst the weirdos. That gives you a little pride, even if it was a struggle.”
But for Lennox, New York’s spell soon wore off. By the summer of 2003, only three years after he’d arrived, he started feeling overwhelmed. He didn’t want to quit Animal Collective, really, but he needed a way out of the city that had so quickly shaped them.
“I was just feeling crazy in New York. The energy was too much for me, too hectic,” he remembers. “I wanted to go somewhere, but I didn’t know where to go.”
Just after noon on Monday morning, Erin Thompson frowns.
Thompson has been at Domino—the label that has handled the Animal Collective’s messy menagerie of releases for nearly two decades—for four years. She’s part of a small phalanx of publicists and managers currently huddled on the fourth floor of NPR’s headquarters, the home of the Tiny Desk. It is President’s Day, so the enormous office is mostly empty, the scene loose—at least, that is, until word begins to spread that there may be as many as 150 NPR staffers and assorted guests in a hallway queue, waiting to crowd around the country’s most famous concert desk. “Oh, no,” she says, addressing me, but also, maybe, some universal higher power. “I hope no one tells Noah.”
The Tiny Desk has made Lennox anxious since the invitation first arrived. During the last two decades, after all, Bob Boilen’s bookshelf-backed corner has developed a mighty imprimatur. It has tossed accelerant onto already-ascendant careers, as it did for Chappell Roan last year, and validated the work of artists in progress, as when Mac Miller got cozy with Thundercat. It can also, of course, expose seams in a sound, especially for aging stars. (Hello, 311.) With and without Animal Collective, Lennox has been both warping his voice and improvising onstage for longer than Tiny Desk Concerts have existed; the rules that give the format its stripped-down intimacy—no vocal processing, relatively low volume, modest setups—spooked him.
“Any sort of unknown thing, unknown environment, I freak out about. I’m not a big fan of TV shows, radio sessions,” he admits later, then pauses, brow cocked. “But I don’t like to feel like I’m avoiding something because I’m scared, either. I’ll get real competitive with myself if I’m scared to do something.”
Lennox built this band piecemeal in Lisbon last year. An old friend, bassist Tim Koh, had moved to town after leaving Ariel Pink’s band. He met Silva, a 24-year-old drummer with a diffident grin, after Silva produced a record for singer Maria Reis, whose family band Animal Collective took on tour after Lennox saw them open, again, for Ariel Pink. (This was, I should say, long before January 6, a date that provided fodder for the occasional tour bus joke.) And Ravede moved to Lisbon two years ago, not long after she and Lennox began dating following a Spirit of the Beehive run with Animal Collective.
Before this morning, they’ve played less than two dozen total shows together, and they’re still developing a full-band camaraderie, feeling out one another’s personal politics and musical pedigrees. Koh, for instance, is impressed by how much Reis, who first arrived in the States two weeks ago, knows about Southern rap. They’re all still learning the sprawling list of cities he’s lived in during the last decade. Silva stares down and fidgets with his shiny backstage laminate like a kid with a novel toy, not quite ready to believe it’s really his.
Their collective experience shows onstage, especially the way they move intuitively with Lennox’s sense of rhythm. But when I ask Lennox how much his quintet had to change in order to accommodate NPR’s restrictions, he stares at his shoes, as if trying not to curse this morning’s taping. “We didn’t change much, really,” he answers flatly, black hair falling just across his brow. “We just play it quieter than you’ll hear it tonight, pretty much.”
I already know he’s underselling it. During soundcheck, I was struck by how gently dynamic the band’s sound was—how Ravede and Reis added electronics that seemed to make the songs float, how Koh and Silva kept it tethered to earth but swaying all the same. Mostly, though, it was Lennox’s unaltered voice that was the revelation, so sweet and almost innocent it reminded me of his choirboy days. It felt, too, like I’d stumbled into some secret room and caught Lennox working through demos, his lilting voice falling in love with a melody for the first time.
I thought about 2004’s Young Prayer, his second solo album, recorded as a gift for his ailing father. Acoustic and mostly wordless, Lennox turns open space into guileless song, his joy in singing offered as evidence that, as he put it long ago to Simon Reynolds in The Wire, “[my dad] had taught me really well.”
And I thought—a little less obviously, perhaps—about how seamlessly he slipped into “Doin’ It Right,” the 2013 Daft Punk collaboration that earned him that Grammy. He’d pestered them for years to remix various Animal Collective and Panda Bear songs, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. When the duo asked him to come to Paris and write with them instead, he was understandably anxious. Daft Punk’s debut, Homework, was one of the four albums he and his brother both loved as teens. (The others: Doggystyle, Rage Against the Machine, and The Chronic.)
He was mostly nervous that they’d play the track, put him in front of a microphone, and tell him to sing. That is precisely what happened. When he asked if he could take the song back to his hotel room overnight and listen until a melody struck him—his preferred method—they said no. “The track was playing in the control room as we’re having this conversation, and I had the idea as we talked. I could tell they felt it,” he remembers. “I wait for the moment the thing happens. I got lucky that day, that I had the moment I was looking for.”
Sinister Grift feels like a string of those moments, where a melody simply seemed to emerge whole cloth. As the world tentatively crept out of the pandemic in 2021, Lennox accepted an invitation to perform at Festival Brillante, in a small town an hour west of Madrid. It would be his first show in nearly two years, so he decided to write almost entirely new songs, a classic Animal Collective move he’d long relished, even though it sometimes backfired. “I thought I played good, but I bombed,” he says. “No response, no engagement, very low energy. It feels like whatever is happening out there is not matching what’s happening with me.”
Lennox stuck with the songs, though, fleshing them out until he asked Dibb if he might help him cut a solo record. He’d just finished his studio in Lisbon, so he liked the symmetry of making his first album there alongside not just his bandmate but the first person with whom he’d recorded. Working remotely on Animal Collective’s 2022 album Time Skiffs, Lennox began to understand how good Dibb had become as a technical producer. Dibb had recommended microphone configurations and made an early mix of the first single, “Prester John,” that delighted Lennox. The idea was to capture the basic songs, then mangle them into strange shapes. But the pair soon began to understand that was unnecessary, that the songs that were becoming Sinister Grift deserved to stand on their own.
“We liked them, straight-up, as they were. Even five years ago, I would have tried to make it more inscrutable and cryptic,” Lennox says. “The older I get, the less fucks I feel like I give. Sinister Grift feels very hang-up free.”
If NPR’s Monday afternoon office crowd makes Lennox nervous, the sweat that slowly starts to drip down his face and onto his orange Baltimore Orioles shirt is the only true tell. A big, beaming guy in an old R.E.M. T-shirt pressed against the desk bounces up and down like it’s a club set. The songs, however, are smooth and gentle, charming. Lennox has told me that he often stares up as he plays, because looking into the crowd makes him nervous. Today, he doesn’t really have that option.
When it’s over, Lennox gives two thumbs up, nods, and grins. After the crowd files out, he puts a cloth mask printed with his face—a prop from a recent video shoot with Perez, part of the brilliantly hyperkinetic graphics Perez mixes with one hand while he runs lights with the other during actual gigs—on the bookshelf behind Boilen’s old desk. He giggles as he suspends it atop a candle and tucks its edge behind a Post-It Note. It feels like a serious gesture, too: He’s let himself be seen and heard here, no matter how uneasy it made him.
We wait outside for two cars to drive us two miles to the 930. Ravede and Lennox burrow into one another’s puffy jackets, as if to insulate each other from the inevitability of time apart as two touring musicians, not to mention the cutting wind. She will begin her first international tour with Spirit of the Beehive as Panda Bear ends his first domestic leg of this tour. Lennox and Ravede won’t see one another for weeks. They kiss as we all climb into SUVs. Weitz, who strolled to the taping from home, walks her to a train to head to Spirit of the Beehive rehearsals.
When we arrive at the 930, Lennox starts dragging gear into place on the stage. The rest of the band joins him until they crack the first chords of soundcheck. “I thought that was fun,” Koh tells Lennox, slapping him on the back. “I’m glad it’s over, man,” Lennox says, then shrugs. “But, yeah, not bad.” From the other side of the stage, Reis chimes in: “Someone in Portugal asked me if we were going to be on Fallon,” she says, laughing. Lennox looks over: “That’s bigger than Fallon. I think?”
They then rumble into songs from Sinister Grift, Lennox’s guitar bouncing around the empty room like pinballs rattling around a rusted tin can. The sound presages the proverbial steam he’ll let off onstage in a few hours; still, his voice hangs there, soaring from the middle.
The plan was to take a vacation.
It was 2003, and Animal Collective had already had a busy year, releasing their first full-length album featuring all four members and making another record, Sung Tongs, in a rural Colorado outpost. Their reputation as a live act had grown, leading to consecutive shows at New York’s Bowery Ballroom and multiple tours across the States and Europe. After one more show, an October festival in Lisbon called Numero, they hoped to spend a few days near the water there, then return home. Wandering around Lisbon that second night, a friendly stranger invited Lennox to a party.
“In my inebriated state, I was like, ‘I know this guy,’ but I’d never met him,” remembers Lennox, laughing. “I got in the car, and that’s how I met my ex-wife.”
By the end of the trip, Lennox knew he was in love with Lisbon and Fern Pereira, especially how blunt she could be with him. She seemed to be an inexhaustible fount of ideas, he says, more imaginative than he could ever be. He was leaving New York. The news stressed his closest friends.
“In college, I definitely saw Noah get focused on something he thought would fix everything, that he needed to be with a person in a way that felt worrisome,” Dibb says. “He’d spent a couple of nights with Fern on tour, and he just started talking about her a lot. I’d seen him get obsessive before. We had many long conversations: ‘Are you sure about this, man?’”
But Dibb never tried talking Lennox out of it. Pragmatically, though, it was troubling for a band that had just begun to glimpse success and had become an integral part of a thriving scene. The forthcoming Sung Tongs, which Weitz says is still his favorite Animal Collective album, felt like an artistic arrival, a collection of magnetic songs ruptured by acid visions. But being in the band didn’t feel like a career yet for anyone, Dibb says, and Lennox’s bandmates worried that his departure would foreclose that possibility.
“I moved to Lisbon with a duffel bag. I had no money,” Lennox says. “It was about trying to stay afloat.”
When he talks about Pereira, I feel like I’m squeezing a fading bruise against his will. They were married six months after he arrived (no wedding, no friends, no bandmates) and had their first child a year later. Buoyed by these changes, Lennox stopped taking antidepressants cold turkey. He endured dizzy spells during the subsequent tour for Sung Tongs, but this was the best he’d felt in a decade—really, since he’d left home for boarding school. “The move, my marriage, having kids, the band really starting to do good,” he remembers. “It was a whole storm of things happening at the same time.”
As the members of Animal Collective resettled across the globe, they began releasing a string of records as astonishing as almost any run by any artist working under the then-broadening indie rock umbrella: Feels, Strawberry Jam, Merriweather Post Pavilion, and a chain of fascinating EPs that felt casual for a band that then seemed capable of everything. (They even became the first band to license a Grateful Dead sample.) Since their earliest days, they’d been electrified by the idea of being an actual collective, in and out of which people could freely move—an antidote to what Lennox calls “the stuff that seemed to be around then, standard indie rock.” There would be no strict roles or rules, no absolute roster. “Every record,” Lennox says, “might be a different band.”
That principle also meant that everyone could work on their own projects. Soon after moving to Brooklyn, Lennox had become infatuated with The Unseen, the 2000 debut of hip-hop producer Madlib’s alter ego, Quasimoto. He found a Boss SP-303, the sampler Madlib had used to make it, and it was one of the few pieces of gear he took to Lisbon. During a 2004 tour in France, not long after his wedding, he played some of his early songs for the rest of Animal Collective.
“When Noah said he was making sample-based music, I expected familiar beats, like boom-bap,” remembers Weitz of that car ride. “It reminded me instead of turntablism and collage music, but not abstract or experimental at all. It was a pop version of that, a beautiful, synthesized version of turntablism. It was this completely new thing, solely of his own.”
Those recordings became Lennox’s 2007 solo album Person Pitch, a dizzying array of samples meticulously sculpted around falsetto hooks. It recalled a bygone era of sunshine pop, flung toward the future. Brian Wilson had recently resurrected his long-shelved grail, SMiLE, and Person Pitch seemed to pull Wilson’s idea of “a teenage symphony to god” squarely into the 21st century. “I’ll try to remember always/just to have a good time,” Lennox sang in one of the record’s most famous bits of self-talk, sounding like a guy in his late 20s finally starting to find adult happiness.
Person Pitch enjoyed instant and near-unanimous acclaim. Of all the year-end lists it made, Lennox may have been most pleased to see it on that of Duane Harriott, the fellow Other Music staffer he’d long wanted to impress. Person Pitch reinforced the sudden sense that Animal Collective was one of the young century’s most exciting bands, a font of the possible. “If doing this is like playing golf,” he tells me of making music, with a chuckle, “Person Pitch is the best round I’ve ever played in terms of success. I’m always trying to beat that score.”
If that sounds double-edged, Person Pitch indeed introduced new sources of potential tension. There was suddenly demand for Panda Bear without Animal Collective, meaning he and the band had to learn how to balance their schedules and prevent burnout. Lennox is an instinctive people-pleaser—a trait he says he got from his dad—and at first he struggled to find that equilibrium. The quest provided an invaluable but hard-won lesson. “It’s not good to swallow yourself all the time,” he tells me. “If you’re constantly like ‘Whatever you want, whatever you want,’ you grow secretly resentful. It’s unhealthy.”
The years-long tide of high praise essentially guaranteed an eventual drop, too. Lennox believes 2011’s Tomboy was better than Person Pitch and, 14 years later, that it may still be his best album. It also openly reckoned, he says, with the assorted pushes and pulls of his life—solo work versus Animal Collective, his young family versus his professional obligations. But the reception was lukewarm; like so many follow-ups to breakthrough albums, it never quite escaped the context of its ballyhooed predecessor.
In 2009, Animal Collective reached a kind of near-pop-star pinnacle with Merriweather Post Pavilion; Lennox’s “My Girls”—a brilliant song about the exciting quest for domestic contentment—was ubiquitous that year, and it remains the closest they’ve come to a “hit song” in any traditional sense. Weitz remembers taking a break from the studio while working on the band’s follow-up, Centipede Hz, early in 2012 for a group hike in the Chihuahuan Desert. (Hikes are rare for Lennox; it became a recurring joke during my time on the bus, since I possibly hike too much.)
“He looks at me and says, ‘You’re about to find out what that feels like,’” says Weitz, referring to the requisite letdown after such an ecstatic high. “I asked if he didn’t think we were making a good record. He said, ‘That has nothing to do with it. I’m just prepared for this record to not stand on its own.’ He was totally right, too.”
As widespread attention ebbed, though, their canny and restless responses to those potential conflicts actually made Animal Collective more intriguing, perhaps even stronger. Their discography became a map of discontent, a band forever in search of new ways to function and sound. Solo works, side projects, and collaborations seemed to ooze freely out of the members as public pressure waned. They now make records when they’re ready; Lennox expects that they’ll reconvene in the studio in 2027, but that’s only his guess.
“We had a moment, and I’m not sure we will ever get back to that place. But I’ve started to think it’s about the body of work, not making the next thing bigger and better,” he says, telling me that the career of Sun City Girls—the visionary Arizona art-misfits whose music he first encountered on that bagel-shop co-worker’s mixtape just after high school—helped him come to that realization. “This is a young person’s game, and it’s really rare that you get more than one chance.”
Sinister Grift is the mature work of someone once again looking for the other side of misery, but it’s also a surprising distillation of the flexible Animal Collective ethos. Weitz built Lennox a bank of 350 samples—bass, synth, vocals, assorted textures—to jumpstart his writing, and several of those sounds appear on the finished record. Dibb produced it, but only after Lennox convinced him that he wasn’t simply “swallowing” himself once more by doing his longtime friend a favor. And that’s Portner on “Ends Meet,” credited for a “noise solo” that sounds a little like broken glass rattling around a saxophone’s bell.
The album is the work of old friends rallying for one of their own after a tough spell, coming together to animate songs about pain and perseverance. “You’re in a spot, precarious/Don’t get confused,” he offers during “Ends Meet,” an endlessly sunny number about keeping one foot out of the grave, at least for now. “It’s gonna call your bluff.” Lennox has long attempted to buoy heavy life lessons with uplifting melodies; he’s never done it better or more clearly than on Sinister Grift. It feels, as Jessica Pratt tells me, “like a particularly honest baring of his soul.”
Lennox’s reasons to press ahead are gathered here, too. He offered Nadja, his 19-year-old daughter, a $1,000 advance and royalties to write the poem she reads during “Anywhere but Here.” And Ravede sings on two songs and painted the cover—a face that vaguely and unintentionally resembles Lennox’s, sporting the look of some pained angel. When he talks about her, he sometimes grins with his entire face. “When I find someone who makes me laugh, and I make them laugh, it’s an instant magnet,” he says. “She’s really funny—one of the funniest people I know.”
The antidepressants were much harder to kick this time around, but he slowly did it. And after Pete Kember started dragging him to a club night he helped launch near Lisbon, Lennox even started DJing in town after years of relative seclusion. Kember tells me it’s been a little like watching someone crawl out of their shell, learning to live again.
“I’ve told him, ‘Dude, this isn’t a dry run for anything,’” Kember says from his home studio, 35 minutes west of Lennox’s place in Lisbon. “This is it. This is your life. If you’re not happy about anything, now is the time to address it.”
There is no way tonight’s show will happen.
While we slept in a Raleigh hotel behind a strip small several hundred yards from the next day’s venue, puffy clouds pushed against the skyline, promising as many as seven inches of snow—an apocalyptic amount for North Carolina’s Piedmont, where I was raised. I have seen this scenario before: By the time we wake up, schools have shuttered, and restaurants are telling employees to stay home.
Just after 11 a.m., the inevitable call comes. Tonight’s show is canceled. Shannon Kaplan, the tour manager with a cherubic face and quick smile, delivers an edict: Be on the bus in 30 minutes or less, so we make it the eight hours to Nashville before weather scuttles the band’s chance to get to tomorrow’s gig, let alone play it. “We’re all here, Sonny,” she soon tells the bus driver, who Lennox says is the best one he’s ever had. “Go when you’re ready.”
The mood onboard is muted and vaguely anxious. Lennox passes the first hour riding shotgun, letting the avuncular Sonny pepper him with road stories. Reis and Silva cuddle on the couch, glances drifting from a TV overhead to the wet snow globe outside. Perez and Koh sit in the back, talking about the situation until Kaplan appears to do what tour managers often do—fix things. “If we can reschedule for Saturday,” she asks, “are you available? We can all fly home Sunday.” Everyone enthusiastically agrees.
“It’s a drag,” Lennox tells me a few hours later. The mood on the bus lifted after a rural truck-stop visit, where Perez bought a pair of brawny Cinnabons for the group and Reis left with a trapper hat made from pink camouflage, but Lennox remains tense. “Obviously, wanting to play for people and not being able to sucks, but there are all sorts of logistics that get annoying. We don’t get paid, and the tour was already … delicate.”
The night before, Lennox had told me how little he liked leading a band on the road, because he constantly worried about whether or not everyone else was having a good time. He dubbed himself a “supporting force” in Animal Collective, meaning he could take a back seat as someone else led. (“He’s the sharpest of all of us,” he said of Weitz, who was an ace navigator in the days of paper maps.) His position of power feels especially burdensome today, then, since he’s the one musician on this bus who’s already, you know, made it. “The cancellation is a bit easier to swallow, because it wasn’t my call,” he says. He aims his thumb at everyone else in the bus: “But the fact that we’re not doing this show is one less day of salary for all of them, which sucks.”
As he says this, I can’t help but remember yesterday—our day off in Raleigh, an inarguably good time. The weather was so warm that a few of us walked a mile for coffee soon after the bus stopped. We headed for Waffle House, which Reis and Silva had only heard about. She learned that she loved dipping bacon into grits, and he became the first member of the clean-plate club after racing through the All-Star Breakfast that Lennox recommended (and got for himself). Perez sang along to a string of songs about Waffle House he’d selected from the digital jukebox, like “Why Would You Eat Your Grits Anyplace Else,” and asked if I might know anyone at Waffle Records, which, yes, is a real label. We all posed for photos out front, the yellow sign as bright as the early afternoon.
Lennox returned to the hotel to sleep and rest his voice, while the rest of us headed downtown to buy records, drink coffee, and simply wander around in the glorious sunshine, a rarity on this winter tour. That night, we were the last table left at Poole’s, arguably the city’s flagship restaurant. Reis glowed as she had macaroni and cheese for the first time, while Silva relished a crab cake. Koh and I argued about politics and financing protests, Perez and Koh about potential Hollywood pedophiles. Lennox promised Reis and Silva better weather in May, when they return to the States for a West Coast run. When Perez mimicked Elon Musk, the whole table erupted. We all shared dessert—except Lennox, who goes for salts but rarely sweets.
During the ride back to the hotel, a Lyft driver swerved into a bike lane to pass a car in a fit of white-hot road rage. Tucked into the back seat, Lennox and I grabbed hold of the row in front of us and laughed nervously. It all felt like a day of band bonding, everyone settling into something like friendship. “Today was great,” he said as everyone drifted into the hotel, relieved to be out of that car alive. “That was a good tour day.”
But, again, in the back of the bus only 18 hours later, that feeling has fled, or at least faded. He tells me how the waiting that tour entails might be the hardest part, how it feels like wasted time. The stress of logistics, the string of new faces, the unknowns of a new place: “I feel like I’m not built the best for this sort of thing,” he says, shrugging, as if stuck between apology and explanation. “I feel like I do this to keep doing the part that I really like. Working at home by myself is my thing.”
During the pandemic, his under-construction studio became his sanctuary as the world and his marriage wobbled. He worked there before it even had a door, first finishing a Remi Wolf remix that impressed his son by landing on Fortnite. (Lennox is a longtime gamer; Jamie, 14, often kicks his ass.)
He tells me about the mammoth acoustic door he ordered from Spain and finally installed in August, just before band practice began in a neighboring rehearsal room in September. When it arrived, as he and a pal struggled to carry it across the street, two Lisbon strangers hopped in to help. When one guy let go too early, the door smashed Lennox’s finger against the ground, breaking it. The pain was excruciating, but he didn’t miss band practice. He doesn’t resent the door, by the way. “It locks,” he says, his tone pure celebration.
In an ideal world, he continues, he could work there forever in private—yes, writing his own music but mostly adding bits to tracks people send him, the thing at which he insists he’s best. But he instantly backtracks, at least a little. He knows what it’s like to be isolated and the damage it’s done before, whether in boarding school or Lisbon. He talks about leaving Lisbon now, how moving back to the United States would make it easier to crack jokes, since his Portuguese has never been very good. He tells me about the idea of working more with Dibb in a kind of production tandem, since Dibb has the technical skills he lacks (and since they’ve kind of been doing it all their life.) He tells me, in essence, about that endless and vexing toggle between connection and concentration, between shaping the world and being shaped by it.
“Living in New York after Boston taught me how to relate to people, to be comfortable talking,” says Lennox, who still hasn’t applied for Portuguese citizenship after 20 years there. “I feel like I’ve gone to ground zero of not being able to deal with people. I can do it again, if I come back here.”
I finally remember to ask Lennox why I’m on his bus at all, a thing several of his friends wanted to know. So many of them were astonished that he had said yes, letting a relative stranger break his bubble of privacy. Animal Collective says no to this stuff almost as a rule, and everyone expected Lennox to do the same.
He first tells me it was because we knew each other, anyway, and that he’d had a positive experience with the writer Philip Sherburne, a mutual friend who spent some time with him for a Pitchfork profile a decade ago. But I’ve been told by his buds to ask this question and even press a little, because there has to be more. At last, he gets there.
“There has been something I have been fighting against in myself since that high-school time, a puzzle I couldn’t solve. Maybe I was in denial about it for a long time, but I couldn’t ignore it anymore,” he says slowly, feeling his way forward as if looking for a light switch in an unfamiliar room.
“This whole period has been about confronting something about myself—wanting to please everyone all the time, maybe,” he continues. “You spend your whole life trying to reconcile whatever happens to you when you’re young. Perhaps this was my time. It felt like, ‘Figure it out, or oblivion.’"
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Asger Carlsen
Grooming by Laramie Glen at Day One