These sort of borderline TMI-confessions can feel revelatory based on what we know about Lennox. “I wanted these hyper-sexual images to interject into talking about a more general love and then suddenly it's like,” he makes a spanking motion, “because I find that sort of happens. On the album’s third song, “Token,” Lennox croons, “ A slap on a jelly ass.” The line appears out of nowhere on a song about different forms of love and how they can get squishy, all mixed up and confused. “I'm revealing stuff about myself that almost feels more personal than”-and here he strums an invisible guitar and adopts a sad voice-“‘ I had a really hard day / I’m really sad about this.’” It’s why Buoys offers us our best look at Lennox: instead of skimming the surface, we’re jumping into the deepest, dankest corners of his mind to discover what he spends all day fretting over (“Where our impulses come from, how maybe they started as something functional but after so much time left unchecked they can drive us into habits that are really unsavory”) or the anxious thoughts that keep him up at night (“The obsession with wealth”).īuoys contains some of Panda Bear’s most instantly memorable lyrics. But Lennox says he held tight to the qualities of the record that made it his, like the guitar that he strums throughout and the sometimes bizarre and vivid lyrics (From “I Know I Don’t Know: “ One more whip of a cheeky slap / One more dip in the natural sap”). Santos wanted to go all in, relying purely on the trappy 808 beats while stripping away what felt elemental to Lennox. Instead, he and producer Rusty Santos tugged at what the soul of the album would be. Lennox says he was careful not to lose himself in the music he looked towards for inspiration. “Not like I was raking it in before.”Īll the shiny new 808s and manicured vocals aren’t an attempt to game the algorithm, though. “It affects me most prominently in that it's just harder to make money,” he says. The effects of Spotify range from minor-like sequencing the album so that the first two songs, the ones everyone listens to most, are the most inviting-to life-altering. Whether or not you released a cult classic over a decade ago is of no importance to the great algorithm. Because in 2019, Spotify and other streaming services threaten to swallow up everything and everyone. Respecting these guardrails isn’t all about referencing Atlanta kingmakers and peppering in Auto-Tune, though. Avey Tare) chased what Lennox refers to as the “skittery” sounds featured on Destiny Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” Buoys feels more like Lennox gamely playing by pop’s rules, though, in ways unlike his previous work. He’s borrowed vocal tricks from Rihanna on previous records and says that early on in Animal Collective band member Dave Portner (a.k.a. Lennox, both through Animal Collective and Panda Bear, has long tried to bend pop music to his will.
In addition to Swae Lee’s robotic warble, Lennox cites a hi-hat taken from a Bad Bunny song, and the 808 drums used by Atlanta producers Zaytoven, Mike WiLL Made-It, and Metro Boomin. To that end, he’s cherry-picked qualities from all over the radio. “Part of it is just being most excited about, or feeling juiced by, contemporary stuff and wanting to make something that added to that conversation more so than previous albums of mine have,” he says. So the bedrock of Buoys are these Sremmurd-y inspirations. The man who’s spent so much of his prodigious career obscuring himself-the man who endeavors to literally sound like mist-is ready for a little bit of time in the sunlight. “Nah, nah, I actually enjoy it,” he says.
He’s squinting a little, so I ask if he wants to move.
The sun outside is flaming orange the rays smack Lennox right across the face, illuminating him like a night light glowing from the inside. But he's not just an essence released from a vial: he's here, in front of me, up high in the bowels of the World Trade Center. “Previously, I was trying to get the voice to sound like a ball of yarn or a cloud or mist in the song,” he says. Sometimes it sounds like Panda Bear records are captured by leaving a tape recorder at the opening of a damp cave from which Lennox, deep inside, throws his voice out like a grappling hook, searching, searching, searching for some generous clod to anchor into. On record, his voice wafts through songs, layered like a mille-feuille. Most surprising about meeting Lennox is that he has a corporeal form at all.
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