There are few bands who manage to render colour into lurid musical being as successfully as Animal Collective. Their albums are made from vivid pulps, gaudy streaks, and soupy palettes from which melodies and hooks emerge with euphoric clarity. They are a band that make pop music, only, you’ve got to find it first.

On their forthcoming album Painting With (to be released in February via Domino) the spectrum is conjured again – crystalline melodies appear fully formed from the psychedelic melee. Far from faded, the brushstrokes feel brighter and bolder than before. I find myself obsessing over this dynamic before I speak to Dave Portner (Avey Tare), one of the band’s vocalists, founding members and multi-instrumentalists.

“The way I got into it was making flyers for shows—somehow it fell on me to do the flyers when we first starting playing,” Portner says, responding generously to a question as simple as ‘do you paint?’ “I started pretty simply at first,” he explains. “I’d take these flyers and hang them up over New York, just as a way to do something organic and visually different, then that carried into doing some of the album artwork. I feel like it takes me away.”