Animal Collective
Isn’t It Now?
DOMINO
Back in June, Animal Collective released the massive single “Defeat,” the studio version of a song that’s been part of their live performances since 2018. One of the longest continuous pieces of music that the band’s ever recorded, “Defeat” spans a sprawling and progressive 22 minutes, transitioning through several discrete sections that feel almost like several songs in one. It’s something like the band’s version of “Close to the Edge”—an ambitious, multi-part suite that journeys from baroque drones to bouncy pop to ambient psychedelic drift. It’s a listen that requires patience (and perhaps a little chemical additive), but it’s gorgeous and easy to like, an encouraging sign that the weirdest aspects of Animal Collective’s music are alive and well.
Likewise, Isn’t It Now?, the band’s thirteenth album and second in a little over a year’s time, finds the long-running indie-psych quartet embracing the most hypnotic and hallucinogenic aspects of their music. Long gone are the feral barks, digital noise, and peyote-trip free-folk freakouts of past material, but in their place is a more richly layered and intricate set of songs that finds them pursuing fresh inspiration via psychedelic headphone symphonies as they start their third decade together as a band.
The material on Isn’t It Now? was written in 2019 in a Tennessee cabin during a creative session that yielded enough material for two full albums. The first set of songs released was last year’s Time Skiffs, which reflected the band’s most overt pop instincts and accessible songwriting amid some of their playful tendencies toward jammier material—if mostly contained and kept concise. Isn’t It Now? is a spiritual sibling to that album, but with an emphasis on a more organic physical chemistry between the four musicians, with the feel of proper live musicianship. It’s not merely that the album is their longest and, as such, prone to longer flights of instrumental fancy, but that there’s a sense of flexible dynamics at play that serves as a reminder that Animal Collective are often at their best when given the ability to explore music onstage together in real time.
Aside from “Defeat,” which comprises one-third of the album’s 60-plus minute duration, Isn’t It Now? is still ultimately a set of pop songs with hooks, choruses, and vibrant melodies. Leadoff track “Soul Capturer” is one of their strongest, a simple strum-along that eventually melts into a dense strata of vocal harmonies and heady synthesizers. The gorgeous ballad “Stride Rite” twinkles with cascades of piano, and “Broke Zodiac” takes an aquatic progressive-pop trip via Pet Sounds. But it’s often in the longer songs where the real magic can be found, such as in the darkly disorienting “Magicians From Baltimore” (its title a pretty good author bio for Animal Collective) and the sublime “Genie’s Open,” the latter driven by a haunting melody full of looping woodwinds.
Along with its predecessor, Isn’t It Now? is above all a confirmation of how much Animal Collective have sharpened their songwriting over the past two decades. But there’s still something undeniably thrilling about hearing that, even as more sophisticated composers, they still have it in them to stretch out and run wild.
