Panda Bear

The new album by Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, features familiar collaborators pulling in a very different musical direction.

Noah Lennox overdubs a vocal at Josh Dibb’s Rabbit Hole Studio in Baltimore.American‑born, Portugal‑based artist Noah Lennox has found enduring popularity in the world of electronic music, both as part of Animal Collective and as a solo artist under the name Panda Bear. New album Sinister Grift is his sixth under the latter name, and sees him backed by something surprisingly close to conventional rock arrangements. And although it’s very much a Panda Bear record, Sinister Grift features contributions from the other three members of Animal Collective: Dave Portner (Avey Tare), Brian Weitz (Geologist) and Josh Dibb (Deakin), and was co‑produced and mixed by veteran Panda Bear and Animal Collective collaborator Josh Dibb.

Dibb, it turns out, had been enlisted by Lennox before there was even an album to be mixed. “During the pandemic we decided to record a record remotely, which became [2022’s] Time Skiffs,” he remembers. “Noah had been recording his own drums. Everybody probably does this, but I will often start to ‘pre‑mix’ things, just to help them make sense to me. Noah was responding really well to what I’d done, and he had even suggested he’d be up for me mixing the record. We all talked about it and ultimately the band felt like that wasn’t the right move. But he said, ‘Well, I want you to do my next record.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, thank you. But you have no record right now!’ But, lo and behold: years later, he stuck to it.”

Unbeknownst to Dibb, an album was indeed taking shape. “I got an offer to do a festival in Madrid, pre‑pandemic,” explains Lennox. “I thought it would be exciting to play all‑new music. So I wrote five, maybe six songs for that. Most of them appear on this album in some form.

“I had the idea to do some straight‑ahead recordings of bass, drums, guitar and singing. I would play everything, and then we would, kind of, abstract those songs into something else. But after recording everything, we just really liked them the way they were. So that idea faded away, and this sort of rock band thing kept going! That’s how I find a lot of stuff happens: there’ll be maybe 10 different ideas I’ll have that hover around for a while, and some of them will go away, some of them grow into other things. And maybe two or three you can trace from the very beginning all the way to the end.”

Camping Out

was co‑produced and mixed by veteran Panda Bear and Animal Collective collaborator Josh Dibb.

The decision was made to record Sinister Grift at Lennox’s own Estudio Campo in Lisbon: by his own admission a modest space, but no less than what was needed. “I just wanted a room,” he explains. “It has a big kind of booth, where you can put a drum kit — which we did — and a control room. I have a pair of ATC monitors, a UAD Apollo interface, a two‑channel Neve preamp, a Drawmer compressor, and that’s pretty much it. I don’t have a lot of outboard stuff. This was the first kind of ‘big project’ that we did there. And Josh was the first person I ever started recording stuff with, so it felt like a closing of the circle, in a way. I was really excited to do it with him.”

For Dibb, the decision to record in Portugal presented a daunting but exciting set of challenges. “I was trying to figure out how much stuff it would make sense for me to fly over with,” he remembers. “Noah had some [Shure] SM57s there, an [Shure] SM7B... I had also convinced him to get some Coles 4038s when we were tracking Time Skiffs. He is quite gear‑resistant in that way! He’ll pick certain things now and again, though, like his ATC monitors in the studio. It didn’t seem cost‑effective for me to fly over with multiple cases, so he sent me a list of mics and preamps and stuff that he could get if needed, and I gave him a wish list based on that. What we ended up with was great. We made it work.”

The first sessions for Sinister Grift took place at Lennox’s own Estudio Campo.

Work began in November 2023, with a streamlined and light‑footed approach to recording. “We would jump around, day to day,” says Dibb. “I’d have mics up on the kit, but then I’d have to move them to another room to do percussion, and then move them back to the kit... I don’t want to overemphasise the jankiness of it; most of the records that I’ve done, Dave [Portner]’s records, too, they’re often like that. They almost feel closer to home recording. So I get into the vibe of that. There’s something beautiful, I think, in getting to the point where you’re like, ‘Well, these are the limitations of what we have to...