Dave Portner is in a timeless void. Not in an existential dread way, but in a “let’s dismantle linear reality and stitch it together with weird melodies and sun-drenched lyrics” kind of way. Welcome to Time Skiffs, Animal Collective’s latest kaleidoscope of sound, where time is more of a suggestion than a rule, and yes, the sun is basically a band member now.
“This was the longest we’ve ever spent on a record,” Dave says, not sounding remotely tired of it. “It was a long time coming, but we’re proud of how it turned out.” The result is exactly what you’d expect from Animal Collective if they were left alone with their instruments, some vintage synthesizers, and an altered sense of the space-time continuum. It’s trippy, playful, meticulous, and, of course, completely immersive.
“Sometimes we only really understand the world we’re creating after the fact,” he admits. “We start off in one place and end up somewhere totally different.” Which is pretty much how most people feel listening to an Animal Collective album anyway. The difference this time is Isolation. Each member worked separately, scattered by pandemic-induced solitude, which led to a record that feels like it’s bending time just to stay together.
The big theme is, you guessed it, time—or more precisely, what happens when time stops behaving. “Linear time doesn’t really exist on this record,” Dave says, as casually as someone talking about their weekend plans. “I feel like the pandemic put everyone in this holding pattern, where we weren’t sure what day it was anymore.” Hence the album title, Time Skiffs, a not-so-gentle reminder that we’re all just floating.
Watch the video for “Walker” and you’ll get it. Time loops, skips, warps. “It’s hard to know whether it’d be a good trip or a bad one,” Dave jokes. Probably both. And then there’s the sun, showing up again and again across the record like a recurring dream. “The sun guides the time of the day, obviously,” he shrugs. “So its relationship to time is pretty important.” Sure, or maybe they just like writing about it.
If Time Skiffs feels a little different, blame—or thank—Tangerine Reef, their 2018 visual album. “That was important,” Dave says. “It reminded us we’re not just a band that makes albums. We’re not about singles or hits, we’re about creating something bigger.” After that, the plan was to record Time Skiffs together. Then COVID hit, and the skiffs got separated.
Still, it’s not just the pandemic. “There was a lot of looking back for me,” Dave says. “We hit the ten-year mark on Merriweather Post Pavilion, and it made me think about why we started this in the first place.” Spoiler: not for the hits. “We’ve done so many different things, but at the core, we’re still Animal Collective. There’s always going to be that element, no matter how far we go.”
Which brings us to the lyrics. Fans like to dissect every Animal Collective song, stitching meanings where none were intended—or sometimes hitting the mark perfectly. “It’s not always deliberate at first,” Dave says. “I’ll just sing how I feel, and later I try to figure out what fits. Sometimes it’s about me, but I like to go beyond that too. Writing just about myself feels indulgent.”
Take “Cherokee,” for example. A road trip song that’s also a meditation on identity, place, and what it means to be an American band in 2022. “Some heavy stuff came up during quarantine,” he says. “I was thinking about where I come from, where we all come from.” The line “the stoop that you love is fiending for meaning” hits like a subtle punch. “Have I taken where I come from for granted?” Dave wonders. “It’s me working through that.”
Even language itself isn’t safe from his curiosity. “I think about language a lot. It’s fun to mess around with,” he says, half-apologizing for driving his bandmates nuts with his rants. “I imagine a future where language disappears, and we all speak in symbols. That’s part of the record too. How different are the past and future really going to be?”
That tension—between the abstract and the catchy—is the secret weapon. Dave might listen to Sun Ra and avant-garde noise, but he can’t help writing hooks. “It’s about balance,” he says. “Too much of one thing and it falls apart. Balance is the key to living, and to making music.”
There’s more music coming, too. A companion record of sorts, born from the same sessions but saved for a different time. “We wrote about 26 songs,” Dave says. “We recorded nine more in a studio, and now we’re figuring out what to do with them.”
Whatever world Animal Collective builds next, expect it to be colorful, weird, and just familiar enough to make you feel like you’ve been there before—or will be, eventually.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
