If Panda Bear’s Buoys sounds like something’s missing, that’s because something is. On purpose.
“I like that parts of it feel like they’re not there,” Noah Lennox tells me. “It’s like half a painting. Or like, you can only see the top half of a jellyfish, but you know the rest is under the surface.”
Welcome back to the world of Panda Bear, where deep sub-bass is a compositional anchor, acoustic guitar tuning is sacred ritual, and lyrics about “slapping the jelly ass” are just reflections of fleeting sexual impulse.
After three albums that shared a kind of maximalist vocal approach—“lots of stacking, harmonies, all that stuff”—Lennox knew it was time for something different. “I’d kind of taken that to its extreme,” he says. “There wasn’t anywhere left to go with it. So for this one, I wanted a singular vocal sound. More intimate. Kind of vulnerable.”
He credits producer Rusty Santos, the same Rusty behind Person Pitch, for suggesting autotune as a gateway to that intimacy. “That became the foundation. Not in the T-Pain sense,” he adds quickly. “More like a texture.”
That tactile sensibility extends throughout Buoys. Lennox wrote the album on acoustic guitar, not out of nostalgia, but necessity. “I hadn’t played guitar much in a long time. My hands were weak,” he laughs. “So I started playing the Sung Tongs songs again just to get it back. It kind of juiced me up to write with it again.”
And then he started removing things. The arrangements got sparser. The sub-bass got fatter. “It was a tradeoff,” he admits. “Laptop speakers can’t really reproduce the low-end, so some people are only getting half the story. But it felt right. The more we took out, the more that low-end just punched out and made everything else float on top.”
The lyrics float too—more collage than narrative, more quilt than roadmap. “There’s no linear story,” Lennox says. “It’s all patchwork.” Take “Token,” a standout track that manages to be both hypersexual and meditative. “It’s about different kinds of love, and how they get confused and tangled up. I wanted these little sexual bursts to pop up in the song, because that’s how desire works—it shows up in weird, extreme ways.”
It’s weird, it’s extreme, it’s somehow chill as hell. In other words: it’s Panda Bear.
Working with Rusty Santos again, Lennox admits, brought him full circle. “There are a lot of parallels to Person Pitch. Even the watery themes are back. And Liz’s crying on ‘Inner Monologue’ reminded me of the crying in ‘Bros.’ Same guitar tuning as Sung Tongs. I didn’t plan it, but yeah—this one definitely links up to the past.”
Speaking of the past, Merriweather Post Pavilion recently turned 10. Lennox says he’s more likely to remember what was happening around the music than the music itself. “That album had very little adversity,” he says. “Everything just kind of flowed. When I hear it now, I think about those moments more than the songs.”
He doesn’t dwell on the mythology of Merriweather or its reputation as a genre-defining landmark. “It’s flattering when people say it influenced them,” he says. “But I never assume that. People said we were obviously inspired by certain things and we weren’t. So I try not to do that to others.”
That humility extends to the way Animal Collective functions now, with more “splintering off” than full-band output. Lennox is fine with that. “We’re kind of back to the original idea of the band—different combinations, solo stuff, everyone doing their own thing. That’s a good thing.”
He even sat out 2018’s Tangerine Reef, which became the first Animal Collective full-length without him. “It was cool to hear something I wasn’t part of,” he says. “It’s like Voltron—it works fine on its own, but when the visuals are added, it becomes something else entirely.”
As for Buoys, Lennox will tour just a little, then get back with the band later in the year. “I can’t stop. Not complaining—it just never stops,” he laughs.
And about that cult-favorite unreleased track, “Atiba Song”? “No plans to release it,” he says. “But never say never. I’d have to find the files first.”
In the meantime, Buoys is more than enough to chew on—just don’t expect it to hold your hand. Or even fill in the blanks.
“You’ve got to let some things be unknown,” Lennox says. “That’s what keeps the ball rolling.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
