"Swimming"

In 2014, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold explained his band’s ostensible disappearance by saying, well, he’d gone back to college. “I never got an undergraduate degree, and this felt like the right time to both see what that was about and to try something new,” he wrote. “I moved to New York and applied to Columbia.”

Then let’s call “Swimming,” only the second song Pecknold has issued since that statement, the product of his New York collegiate tenure, as it echoes the downtown days of instrumental Sonic Youth and that band’s influences and contemporaries, like Loren Connors and Glenn Branca. Over the lolling march of drummer Neal Morgan, Pecknold slowly sculpts echoing rays of distortion into a riff, with a surfeit of delay causing the theme to turn into an auditory uroboros. Morgan eventually goads him ahead, his elevated pulse pushing Pecknold to move from drift into drive. It’s a casual, quick take, suggesting two roommates in a dorm room turning off the lights and jamming through a state of innocent bliss a few months after discovering Murray Street or Daydream Nation.

The most lasting element of “Swimming” might be what it says about Pecknold the humorist. Four months ago, he baited fans with a sweet-and-sour cover the Five Keys’ “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” showing that his coo remains every bit as comforting as when he first charmed on “White Winter Hymnal.” But this is the switch, a sly instrumental indulgence from a singer who’s not so shy about his patience.