From the opening minutes of Buoys, Noah Lennox's sixth solo album as Panda Bear resembles something both wholly new and intimately familiar to fans and followers of the musician and Animal Collective member's body of work. Lennox's bright, sincere voice is still front-and-center, along with his beatific approach to melodic structure and vocal phrasing—but there's miles of space surrounding it, a guitar and a few textured samples here and there fleshing out Buoys' dubby sparseness. The off-white loveliness of his 2011 LP Tomboy is recalled, as well as the sampledelia of 2007's landmark Person Pitch—but Buoys otherwise represents a surprising and intimately pleasurable new direction for an artist who's embraced not repeating oneself as its own creative ethos.
The latest Panda Bear release since 2018's vinyl-only release A Day With the Homies and the follow-up to 2015's kaleidoscopic Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, Buoys began gestating in late 2017, as Lennox joined up with producer and frequent collaborator Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, DJ Rashad, Eric Copeland) in the former's current home of Lisbon, Portugal. "He came over for some work of his own and spoke about music he’d recently been involved with—mainly sad trap and reggaeton productions," Lennox explains on how Santos became involved with Buoys. "We spoke about contemporary music and the production processes and techniques used in its creation. I hoped to translate the new songs into music that might, if only at the surface, feel familiar to a young person's ears."
One approach the pair took was dialing back the guitar-heavy structure that Lennox's early versions relied on: "When I wrote the songs, it was just guitar and singing and a simple rhythm arrangement. Rusty's first move was to mute the guitar. That was the biggest change that took place before the finished product." Another was introducing Auto-Tune as a studio tool, which was the first time Lennox had worked with the program since his 2015 remix of Eric Copeland's "Cheap Treat," and a fruitful device for exploring the limits of his own sound. "It was a long journey we went on—I wasn't expecting to before we got together, but it was fun," he explains. “I was trying to find a single vocal take to drive the whole album—not too many harmonies—and the Auto-Tune let that happen. It gave it this texture and thickness to my voice that I was otherwise using reverb or doubling to get." Lennox also cites Atlanta ("A lot of sub-bass and 808 kicks") as an influence on Buoys' sound—a logical extension of the rhythmic and sample-based work Lennox has engaged in through the Panda Bear project since Person Pitch.
Alongside Santos, Buoys also features collaborators in Chilean DJ/vocalist Lizz and Portuguese musician Dino D'Santiago, both artists who came to Lennox via Santos’ recent trap and reggaeton production work; the former contributes arrangements throughout, and both lend their vocals to the mercurial album cut "Inner Monologue." "Lizz and Dino are people Rusty had been working with in the months leading up to Buoys," Lennox explains. "Dino does a lot of work at Big Bit, the studio where we recorded Buoys, and Lizz was also around Lisbon. She had some great arrangement ideas— the snare on 'Dolphin' became a water drop sound thanks to her, and she also added crying to 'Inner Monologue,' of which I dug the connection to the crying on Person Pitch's 'Bros'."
Thematically, Buoys is concerned with both the present-day climate and the future that younger generations hold promise to. "What's going on in the world definitely influenced the album," Lennox states. "It's tough for me, because I'm not the kind of person who likes to get up and tell people how to think. I don't like shouting at people. Rather than combat the stuff in the political sphere, I'm hoping to dig a little deeper.”
This gentle, prescriptive perspective comes through on penultimate cut "Crescendo," which finds Lennox imploring to "Ripple with friends/ That ripple with you" over stretched-out guitar and layers of echo, as well as the ecstatic opening lines of the title track: "It comes to me/ It's plain to see/ Not only me, nowhere to be/ I got a ride." "It's the fulcrum for the album, lyrics-wise—the album's humility battle-cry," Lennox explains regarding the song, which was one of the first cuts written during Buoys' creative gestation. "'Leave it on the ground' is a reference to all that unpleasant stuff we've got inside us all—the unintended fruits of instincts warped. So we're all buoys, markers floating on an expanse hinting at a treasure buried deep."
"I wanted to think more universally, like behavioral psychology — why people do the things they do," he elaborates on the lyrical content of Buoys. "I'm interested in thinking about that stuff a lot, and it shows up in the lyrics. Sometimes behaviors of mine show up in the lyrics, but I'm trying to think more universally." Most surprising is the occasional lustiness that emerges throughout Buoys—specifically, on the gorgeous and cascading "Token," which finds Lennox referencing "A slap on a jelly ass" in his high register over swaths of guitar. "There's sexual interjections here and there—never a literal thing, but more representing the sexual impulse and how it can show itself in times when you might not want to think about that stuff," Lennox ruminates on the thematic territory.
"The last three records felt like a chapter to me, and this feels like the beginning of something new," Lennox states while surveying how Buoys relates to his estimable catalog so far. "It feels like I'm turning the page a little." Indeed, Buoys is full of fresh ideas from one of modern music's most fascinating, innovative, and emotionally generous artists—intoxicating in its straightforwardness, holistic in its approach to the current state of humanity, and unforgettable as the latest installment in Lennox's unbeatable career.
