Animal Collective's status as avant-indie's premiere jam band has now officially been solidified. According to a Tweet from their management company, the band has cleared the first ever officially licensed Grateful Dead sample. (Via Gorilla Vs. Bear.)

The currently unreleased track "What Would I Want Sky" contains a sample of the Dead song "Unbroken Chain". According to Leg Up! Management, Dead bassist Phil Lesh himself professed his love for the song.

Right now, there are no confirmed plans to release "What Would I Want Sky", though bootlegs of the track are floating around the internet. In an interview with the A.V. Club, the band had this to say about the track:

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Brian Weitz [aka Geologist]: "And 'What Would I Want Sky' is something that Dave [Portner, aka Avey Tare] wrote for* Merriweather *and sent Noah [Lennox, Panda Bear] and I, but we didn't have time to work on parts before we got to the studio, and then one day a week, the engineer would like to have a day off. But we would usually go into the studio anyway and work on the songs that we had never played live, and some that didnâ€™t make it on the record. 'What Would I Want Sky' is one we just never got to. We just didn't have enough time, so we worked on it in Lisbon in January. We all went to Lisbon to hang out for a week, and thatâ€™s when we made a full-band version of that song."

David Portner [aka Avey Tare]: "Hopefully, we're gonna do a kind of 'Brother Sport' EP at the end of the year, with the extra tracks and maybe 'What Would I Want Sky'. I think that would be sweet."*

Yes, it would be sweet.