Released in the first week of 2009, Merriweather was the capper for Animal Collective’s most prolific and impressive period—eight albums in nine years, with each release expanding the band’s avant-leaning sound along with their fanbase. Their 2000s run remains nearly unmatched in indie’s experimental and overground corners alike, a steady rise to prominence aided by the pre-algorithm era of tastemaking guided by the prominence of MP3 blogs and online music publications. From the raw noise bursts and static lullabies of 2000’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished all the way through to Merriweather, Animal Collective’s sonic trajectory resembled an incidental push toward openness as they retained their more peculiar stylistic peccadilloes.

Leading up to Merriweather, the band’s 2007 album Strawberry Jam offered a distillation of the potentially off-putting elements that coated Animal Collective’s previous albums like thick moss, as Dave Portner (Avey Tare), Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), Brian Weitz (Geologist), and Josh Dibb (Deakin) added a newfound romanticism to their sonic brew. But very little on Strawberry Jam gestured toward the sonic leap the band was primed to make on Merriweather Post Pavilion. Instead, Merriweather’s sample-layered approach drew direct inspiration from another 2007 benchmark within the greater Animal Collective universe: Lennox’s third album as Panda Bear, Person Pitch, a collagist classic of sidelong Beach Boys-isms and kitchen-sink sonics that sits firmly in the sampledelic canon alongside musical milestones ranging from Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique to the Avalanches’ Since I Left You. “One was an evolution of the other,” Lennox told The Quietus in 2012 about the connection between Person Pitch and Merriweather, and the latter indeed resembles a motion-smoothed remaster of the former’s gorgeously cluttered tableau.

Written and recorded by Lennox, Weitz, and Portner, Merriweather’s genesis was as much by necessity as it was the product of taking creative cues from their past work. After Dibb chose to take a break from the band after recording Strawberry Jam, the remaining three members were faced with following a guitar-heavy album—that was also their most successful release to date—without the member that fans thought of as the band’s guitarist.

Shifting lineups from album-to-album was far from new territory for Animal Collective; several of the group’s early releases, including the watershed Sung Tongs, only featured Lennox and Portner. But then, the tour that followed Strawberry Jam’s release clearly felt different from previous outings, during which the band built a fan-cherished reputation for testing out embryonic drafts of new material that could undergo drastic changes before they were finally recorded. In contrast, the Merriweather material sounded shockingly fully-formed in concert an entire year before it would be released, suggesting that the songs were undergoing a perfectionist fine-tuning rather than being figured out onstage.

Indeed, despite the expensive-sounding intricacy of the finished product, everything about Merriweather practically screams “live”—from the titular reference to the outdoor venue near Baltimore that the band would eventually perform at in 2011, to the decision to record by setting up PA systems in producer Ben H. Allen’s Mississippi studio to capture an in-concert feel. The resulting iconography produced by these buzz-building gigs—Animal Collective as a trio, keening and vibing behind a sparse sampler setup—was fully reflected in the Apple-commercial-esque video treatment for “My Girls.” And the proliferation of Animal Collective live recordings through message boards and torrent services undoubtedly aided in the fever pitch of anticipation that accompanied Merriweather’s release.

Ironically, the same file-sharing forces that contributed to the hype surrounding Merriweather also stood as its biggest threat. Throughout the 2000s, albums big and small leaked like crazy, tapering off near the end of the decade with a series of piracy-drubbing stings and arrests. The ultra-early leaks that besieged Person Pitch and Strawberry Jam’s rollouts were a palpable concern during the Merriweather era; the mere presence of smartphones and computers were verboten in Allen’s studio, but the internet nevertheless persisted.

In November 2008, a couple of months before Merriweather’s release, a French music podcast unwittingly leaked album closer “Brother Sport” by including it in their broadcast, with Grizzly Bear frontman Ed Droste linking to the stream on his band’s blog. British anti-piracy company Web Sheriff—hired by Animal Collective’s label Domino to combat imminent leaks—was on the case, forcing Grizzly Bear to post an apology for the infraction. When a leaked version of Merriweather made it onto the internet in full during the 2008 holiday season, approximately nine days before its official release, the album’s Wikipedia page was briefly edited to refer to the leak as “a Christmas gift to the world.”

It quickly became clear that the anticipation was justified. Upon release, Merriweather was met with nearly unanimous critical praise. Die-hard fans may have their own personal faves, but Merriweather is inarguably Animal Collective’s most purely listenable release, as lovely as a babbling brook with trippy textures befitting the album’s organically psychedelic, Magic Eye-style cover art. The band’s penchant for slow builds and hallucinatory repetition is present throughout but, recast through the lens of dance music, their stridency comes off as toothsome instead of grating. From the Frankie Knuckles-interpolating loop that runs through “My Girls” to the intense techno pulse of “Summertime Clothes,” Merriweather practically sounds like sticky, glistening candy—sweet and sharp, with a taste that lingers long after the last bit’s melted away.

Lyrically, Merriweather represents Animal Collective achieving peak clarity and effectiveness—no small feat for a band previously inclined to hoot and holler about mildewed rice and “inky periods” that “drip from your mailbox.” There’s Lennox’s affective ruminations on family, protection, and the shimmering beauty that can accompany daily life: Along with the fatherly reflections found on “Daily Routine,” the ebullient “Brother Sport” reflects on the death of Lennox’s own dad, as he offers prescriptive advice to his brother over whirligig synths: “I know it sucks that daddy’s done/But try to think of what you want.”

Portner’s contributions are no less striking, despite a previously displayed predilection for obfuscation so strong that he once released an entire album of backwards-tracked gibberish. He lustily praises trash-cluttered streets and late-night eating on “Summertime Clothes” and embraces his own form of emotional clarity over the hectic climax of “Lion in a Coma,” effectively encapsulating the millennial drift that’s since hovered over the generation that came of age with Merriweather in hand: “Sometimes I’m well to do/But I don’t know what to do/Sometimes I don’t agree/With my thoughts on being free.”