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Since their 2009 breakthrough album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective have done exceptionally well staying busy without worrying about a proper follow-up. There have been solo albums (Dave "Avey Tare" Portner's Down There, Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox's Tomboy), an experimental DVD, a live box set, and a fine EP. They've played a lot of shows. Things have shifted in their personal lives. Portner has moved away from the East Coast for the first time, and now lives in Los Angeles. Lennox has two children with his wife in Portugal. Brian "Geologist" Wietz is married and has a child. And Josh "Deakin" Dibb is back in the fold, writing songs and performing with the group, after taking a hiatus from the band after 2007's Strawberry Jam.

Amid all this change, Animal Collective found the time to create a new album. They got together to write in their hometown of Baltimore for three months in early 2011. They hadn't lived there together in years. It was stressful. And once they had the songs they wanted, they recorded them in El Paso, Texas, again with the assistance of Merriweather producer Ben Allen. They called the record Centipede Hz. (Stream the album in full here.)

Given its dense, clattering production and more challenging structure, it seems unlikely that the new album will be as popular as its predecessor. But if that bothers Animal Collective, I saw no evidence of it. These guys tend to take the long view. "Animal Collective" is the thing, and this is another stop along the way. The four of us met in a rented apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I spoke a bit more later with Portner by telephone.

"We knew that the stuff we were doing for Centipede Hz was

not as instant as Merriweather, and that it was going to be

harder for people to get their heads around." -- Deakin

Pitchfork: In terms of the size of your audience and how many people were paying attention to you and coming to shows, there was huge a jump around Merriweather Post Pavilion____. I'm wondering if there's a certain kind of pressure in following that.

David Portner: I don't think we're ever trying to turn anybody away. With something like [2010 "visual album" DVD] Oddsac, especially coming after Merriweather, [some people wondered], "Oh, are you trying to react to the mass appeal of doing something that's so pop?" That would never occur to us. We want people to like this record as much as Merriweather. To us, it's just offering a different kind of music and being like, "You should check this out."

Josh Dibb: But we were aware that these songs are going to be more challenging. Listening to Merriweather, there were certain things that were very instant and exciting. We knew that the stuff we were doing [for this record] was not as instant, and that it was going to be harder for people to get their heads around.

Pitchfork: What was it like being back together in Baltimore to write this album? Did you feel like there were old ghosts in the air?

DP: I moved into a house that was blocks away from our high school-- it was definitely a little bit weird to feel this mixture of old and new. I was just like, "I don't know if I can really handle this for so long." Just driving the same roads, going to Josh's mom's place. It's pretty much where we all started playing together for days and nights when we were in high school. But the time spent actually at the studio jamming was awesome. My girlfriend had never lived in Baltimore before, so I was living vicariously through her.

JD: That extended period of seeing each other pretty much every day for three months eventually got to us. We haven't done that in a really long time. Everything since Feels has pretty much always been these really concentrated situations-- we get together for 10 days and hammer something out. Just having the experience of seeing each other every day was what marked this record.

"I always dreamed of going out to space. The idea of going to a planet where nobody's ever been is attractive to me." -- Panda Bear

Pitchfork: How about for you, Noah?

Noah Lennox: It was very stressful. I had my wife and two kids with me. We moved in with my mom at her place, which was, in retrospect, kind of a bad idea. Not because there was friction, it was just weird navigating that relationship. When we were working on music, I was psyched to do that. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking about [my family] and when I was with them I was thinking about the music and wanting to make sure we were spending enough time working as hard as we could. I was in two places all the time. And I was sick for like a month and a half. My nose was bleeding all the time. It was a chaotic time for me.

Pitchfork: Noah, do you feel any anxiety about living far away from the other guys in the band?

NL: Not really.

BW: You're talking to a guy who would move to Mars.

NL: I always dreamed of going out to space. The idea of going to a planet where nobody's ever been is attractive to me, it just suits my nature. Maybe when I first moved to Portugal, I was like, "How is this going to work?" But once we started working together and I started seeing the guys on tour pretty regularly, all the reservations faded away.

Pitchfork: Are there any older artists that you've admired that make you think, "Here's a good way to have a life in music."

DP: I can respect a band like the Grateful Dead for being able to push on for so long and build a fan base. I respect somebody like Björk for always being able to create her own image and do something that feels personal. Then there's a band like Black Dice, who I feel had a lot to do with getting us going-- they took us on our first tour and showed us a way of doing things that I still think about.

Pitchfork: Dave, do you think of yourself as the leader of the band?

DP: [laughs] No, not at all. I've never been asked that before. I guess there's probably an impression that I have a larger leadership role since I do a lot of songwriting. But it doesn't feel that way. When we're all together working it feels like this mutual thing. Even outside of the music, we just split all the stuff that we have to do so equally. When you're writing songs and you have these other people bringing this vision you have in your mind to reality, you think about how much control you want to have in that. And it's nice to not have so much control a lot of the time. I'm lucky that it's so easy to play and work with these guys, so it never feels like there's the need to be so much in control. It definitely seems open.

Pitchfork: All of you guys keep low profiles online. Obviously, over the last decade, a lot has changed in that realm.

NL: We still don't have a website! We're working on it. Coming soon.

Pitchfork: There's your message board, which is active and you guys have been on there at various times. But is it important for you to keep your music and creative life separate from online interactions?

NL: It depends what you mean by "online interactions." We have a Facebook page that I go on sometimes. But as an individual, I'm in touch and close with the people I want to be close with. I only recently started wanting to do Twitter because I wanted to follow certain writers. It definitely feels like there's one side to it where people just know what you're doing and where you are every second of the day. And that's something I just don't want to have.

Pitchfork: You've talked a bit about Centipede Hz being inspired by radio transmissions and possibly traveling through space__. Where did that come from?__

DP: My brother was a DJ when I was growing up, and there was a radio station called B104 in Baltimore. He had recently got a CD of all the radio identifications that come between [songs], and we were going back through everything, listening to how weird and spacey and experimental it sounded. When you add that element to radio, it's this weird form of musique concrète. We thought it would be cool and also a little funny to have something like [sings like a radio segue] "more continuous music" in our live set, just because that's our style of playing.

Pitchfork: This record is dense and wide and bursting with textures. Did that shift in color and style come out of the concept?

JD: That came out of playing together. It goes back to the difference between writing in headphones and writing live. In headphones, I immediately hear everything that everybody does and how it works in a stereo field. But when you're playing in a room, Dave's amp is over here and the vocals are over there and there might be things that people are doing that you might not even realize are happening until you get into a studio and record. Generally, I know what Brian's sounds are and what effects Dave's using, but you feel the energy of the room and it feels really good.

Pitchfork: I feel like I understand the record better when I listen on speakers. It needs some air to it.

BW: We said the word "air" a lot in the studio with Ben. With all Dave's sequencer stuff on a song like "Monkey Riches", it was like, "No, that needs air, record it through an amp or a speaker in the room, it can't just be direct. It doesn't sound right."

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Pitchfork: Was there anything that you guys were listening to when you were setting about making this record?

DP: There's a lot of older stuff we went back to. Classic psychedelic sounds that we grew up listening to in high school or college, and a lot of psychedelic rock that incorporated electronics. Bands like Fifty Foot Hose, or this Italian band Le Orme, this one record, Ad Gloriam, we've always all been into. Contemporary classical electronics, older analog textures, Stockhausen-- his ability to use space is awesome. We have worked in the realm of organic or natural sounds for a while so I think we wanted to do something that felt different from that.

Pitchfork: Your voices have a fair amount of processing on a number of these songs; sometimes it has an alien quality.

DP: We talked about that a lot going into it. Some of us want more effects than others, but in the long run it's what fits with the song. I still want to have that human connection and for people to be able to relate to the voice. There has to be something guiding it if there's a million other crazy things going on. It also has a lot to do with us being familiar with the songs. With a lot of our records, we're like, "It's so apparent-- everyone's going to be able to hear the song and hear the melody and figure it out." And then, it turns out, not so much.

Pitchfork: Josh, why are you singing lead for the first time on this album, on "Wide Eyed"?

JD: I've been writing music the same amount of time as anybody in the band, but Noah and Dave's songwriting is brilliant and special, and within the context of the band, I'd be like, "Well, I don't have anything to really add to that." I was more psyched playing along with it. One of the reasons I decided to not focus on playing live so much after Strawberry Jam is because I wanted space for myself. I felt like there was this thing that had been important to me and I kinda let it slip away.

"I haven't listened to Merriweather since 2008." -- Geologist

Pitchfork: Noah, were your songs on this record written with Animal Collective in mind the whole time, or were they stuff that you worked on your own?

NL: One of them was, one wasn't. "New Town Burnout" was something I did toward the end of writing the songs for [Tomboy], so I took that melody and made the song for the band.

Pitchfork: Are the months leading up to a record's release exciting for you now?

BW: I like the time in between when we finish the record and nobody else has heard it. That's when I can listen to it and almost divorce myself. A week after we finish it, I'll listen to it and be like, "Is it OK?" In that week, I'll usually stress. There's so many different ways we could decide to do this or that. But after we turn it in, all that disappears for me, and I can almost forget that I'm listening to my own band. I can take some pleasure in listening to the record. And then, once this [promotion] process starts, I have to attach myself to it again, and then I'll probably never listen to it. I haven't listened to Merriweather since sometime in 2008.

Pitchfork: Do you ever think about what would it be like if the band ended?

DP: Oh, totally. Especially lately, having been together for so long. Ten years. Not that it seems worth stopping-- I'm still excited to keep doing this and to do music in general. But it's definitely interesting to think about. I don't go far beyond just thinking, "Man, what would I even do?" I'm sure I would still do music. But a lot of music is just really easy for me to do with Animal Collective, so it's hard to think beyond it.