Josh “Deakin” Dibb is the Ringo of Animal Collective—the member of a revered psychedelic-pop quartet that gets the least amount of love. Though in Dibb’s case, that’s mostly a function of spotty attendance. He’s the only Animal Collective member still taking advantage of the group’s formative open-door policy, having appeared on just five of their 10 official albums, and his perceived expendability is further underscored by the fact the band’s most successful record to date—2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion—was recorded without him.

Unfortunately, his status as Animal Collective’s resident black sheep was further entrenched by the well-intentioned but ill-conceived Kickstater campaign he used to announce this debut solo album way back in 2009. After crowd-sourcing over $25,000 to fund a festival trip-cum-recording mission to Mali—with promises of an accompanying picture-book to complement the resultant album—Dibb provided scant updates about the project’s status for the better part of seven years, causing many donating AnCo fans to lose their chill. But this would-be scandal failed to address a more prosaic problem: as Dibb recently relayed to Pitchfork, the extended delay was mostly the product of chronic, near-paralyzing self-doubt about the quality of his material and vocal performances.

Now, having long ago donated the majority of the Kickstarter proceeds to a Malian NGO, Dibb has finally emerged with a mostly self-financed, small-scale album that was quietly released this month in a special cassette/book edition for donors (and on Bandcamp for everyone else). But despite all the Kickstarter confusion and communication breakdowns, none of Dibb’s out-of-pocket supporters should feel short-changed. Because whatever anxiety Dibb felt about not following through on his Kickstarter campaign has been channeled into a wonderful little album about overcoming the anxiety of not following through on your Kickstarter campaign. Okay, so Sleep Cycle doesn’t include any lyrics that specifically reference inflated funding targets and comment-section outrage, but this exercise in self-help psychedelia provides a poignant portrait of an artist regaining their confidence one song at a time. It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes—but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.

To date, Deakin's biggest solo vocal was on the swirling Centipede Hz centerpiece “Wide Eyed.” But even if Sleep Cycle’s opener, “Golden Chords,” finds him crooning in a heretofore-unheard higher register, it’s instantly identifiable as an Animal Collective product, its field-recording ambience and hypnotic acoustic oscillations conjuring allusions to Sung Tongs (ironically, another AC album that Dibb sat out). But Dibb’s lyrics are far more lucid and plaintive than anything Avey Tare and Panda Bear were attempting back in 2004: “Stop believing your being’s been shattered and distorted/ because, brother, you’re so full of love,” he sings atop a beautifully aching melody, and though the lyrics are delivered in second person, you get the strong sense Dibb is singing them into a mirror.

As a vocalist, Dibb is positioned about halfway between Panda and Avey—not gifted with the natural angelic grace of the former, yet more plainspoken and less prone to hysterics than the latter. But he knows how to get the most out of it, immersing his voice in his aqueous mixes without obscuring its emotional intent. Amid the phantasmagoric dub-pop of “Just Am,” he sings, “I’ve lost my voice, I need direction,” so he relies on the song’s repeated juju guitar lick, steam-piped beat and drifting piano chords to show him the way. And if unadorned opening verse of “Footy” initially puts some Jeff Mangum-like strain on his cords, they prove resilient enough to withstand the incoming onslaught of percussive shocks. True to its title, “Footy” essentially sounds like Dibb kicking a drum set down a never-ending flight of collapsing stairs, pausing at each wobbly landing before working up the strength for another punt. But just as the song seems like it’s going to completely combust, an encroaching tsunami of analog synths washes the destruction away, representing the victory of inner peace over external pressure.

Sleep Cycle’s weightier tracks are threaded together through brief interstitials featuring street recordings of Malians that Dibb encountered on his African excursion, but they’re more than mere vacation souvenirs—on “Shadow Mine,” he mutters his own affirming words overtop a Malian chant, and the effect is like eavesdropping on the private prayer of someone working up the courage to face the outside world. “Seed Song”, meanwhile, answers the cacophonous chaos of the aforementioned “Footy” with a rippling, pulse-regulating soundscape that provides another vivid reminder of Animal Collective’s mid-2000s masterworks. But the closing, stargazing ballad “Good House” is less about Feels than the #feels. Atop a churchly, Spiritualized-style sway, Dibb dispenses reassuring mantras (“Breathe in without/ Breathe out you’re alright/ Breathe in with all/ Spit out all that rage/ You’re safe now/ Don’t fight”) much as he did back on “Golden Chords.” But here it sounds less like a personal therapeutic exercise than the sage advice of someone who’s survived a crisis of confidence and is now trying to help you cope with your own. And surely, that’s a reward more valuable than anything promised on his Kickstarter page.