Collected Animals

once again:

the people who write the reviews do not pick the rating

the board's toxic relationship with reviews exists only in the "anything below a 4/5 review gets roundly dismissed as bad writing" sense (which does in fact suck a lot, there was a mixed early review of skiffs that got trashed here that was actually quite well done). but it is fine and normal to talk and speculate about music reviews lmao (it's even okay to care about them! you don't have to pretend you don't)

it's so beautiful

I don’t want to be that person but the lossless sounds so much better than the 320. Recording to tape left so much airiness to all these songs that a hard cap in lossy formats seem to take away. I feel like I’m listening to this outdoors in a nice field!

Happy release day everyone What a beautiful journey that’s led us here.

Living in the third act of an Adam Sandler movie rn

It would've come out sooner, but if you talk to Domino...we just don't make it easy on them, or ourselves, when it comes to how much we're putting stuff out, whether it's solo stuff or Animal Collective records. We want to put our film scores out on vinyl, Dave reissued Spirit, Noah and Pete did their thing, and Dave had been sitting on 7s for two years as well. It would've come out sooner! But it was recorded and released as soon as possible. It wasn't solely just to clear it out, but we do have a lot going on. All of us are doing solo stuff that we're really into. Dave and I have New Psychoactives that we made a record for while soundtracking our friend's art installation, and we put it out on cassette and sold it on tour. We know that there's a limit to how much Domino can put out, but also to how much people can pay attention to us these days.

In terms of the press we're doing for this record, it's not a normal press cycle. It's much more laid-back. [Laughs] There's way less interest. And it's not like they're saying they don't like the record—or, at least, they're being polite and not saying that. Even scheduling this with you was so funny. We literally had to be like, "When was the last time you talked to Larry? Four months ago? Six months ago? Eight months ago?" And I literally had to be like, "OK, I'm up, but I did speak to Larry for Time Skiffs." And Josh was like, "Well, I spoke with him for Time Skiffs, too." And Dave was like, "I spoke to him for 7s," and Noah was like, "I talked to him for Reset." (Editor's Note: Noah has actually been on the newsletter twice as well.) We were like, "Why does he want to talk to us? Isn't he sick of us at this point?"

We're not touring this record. Touring takes a lot for Animal Collective when it comes to rehearsals and start-up costs, and that last tour was gonna lose a lot of money anyway. We're no longer popular enough in Europe that we can tour the same way we do in America, and we have to take some responsibility for that by scaling back a bit. But we were gonna ask the label for tour support while scaling back, and it was going to be break-even at best—and if someone gets sick, we lose a lot of money. And we lost a lot of money last year from the North American cancellation we did. You want to still pay your crew—they can't just go get another job. They're not getting publishing royalties. The bus company can't rent their bus out, so you still gotta pay for that too.

We don't get the kind of advances we got in the past. We can't live off of making records, but it's been a while since we could—at least as a band, since we split things however many people play on a record, and we pay our manager and stuff like that. However, there was a time when we could. I still don't have a day job, and because the 2000s were successful enough...I'm not a millionaire, never been one, but it was good enough that, with my wife working and getting health insurance through her job, I have a couple of years before I would need to panic. Not everybody can say that. We were in the final era of a band getting royalty advances pre-streaming, that doesn't exist anymore.
...
Isn't It Now? is part of a new deal with Domino, but the deals are different than we've done in the past. The last one was for four records, this one is not. It's not like there's anything wrong with the relationship. Domino's great to us. I'm sure every label complains about their bands, and every band complains about the label, but I count myself lucky—just like being in the band. We've all been friends for so long, and sometimes we get in arguments on tour, and our crew or the support band in the van will be like, "I don't think you guys get how lucky you are. You're complaining about someone you work with and create with for 30 years. I don't have that in my life. Be grateful for that and shut up." Our manager says that about Domino, too. She says, "I deal with a lot of record labels, and I don't see them trusting other acts the way Domino trusts your instincts. The reason why the contracts are different is because nobody has any idea of where this industry is going.

I started to realize a little later that we had such a blast making Painting With that that influenced things. The touring was so much fun, too. But we never played those songs live before we tracked them, so it was a case of what I used to worry about. We always played songs live before recording them, and I felt that helped the songwriting process. You learned that if you outgrew ideas after doing them every night, they weren't worth keeping.

With Painting With, we played those songs together privately for a while, but they became a different beast after the record came out. Maybe there were just different vantage points to look at those songs from. Maybe they didn't have to just be three minutes! When we played "On Delay" live, it was six minutes long, and maybe that was a better version. I kind of got why, for us, we had a goal and a blast working on that goal, so it felt like a huge success, but people weren't a part of that experience with us. They just got the results. For other records, they were part of the process with us as we were testing things out live and they were hearing how things developed. Maybe it didn't feel as abrupt to them. But yeah, "They just showed up and made a bunch of goofy, annoying noises." To me, I'm like, "That's what I've been doing in the band for 20 years!"

On that tour, we were like, "We haven't played 'Taste' in a long time," so we had to listen to it, and we realized that if you took the reverb off of it, it sounded just like it would've been on Painting With. That was the only difference I heard. But after I saw different sides of the songs live, I realized, "These things I did here I could've done better on the record." And I can't say that about other Animal Collective records, because things had gotten to a point where I felt pretty good about what I was playing. But I don't think that record sucks like everyone else seems to do. [Laughs]