Today Animal Collective share their latest single “Strung with Everything” via a video directed by Abby Portner. “Recently for Animal Collective’s live shows I have been designing and animating all of the video content out of cut paper,” says Portner. “I have been editing together symbols and colored static silhouettes that match the music's feeling and rhythm. The videos are like pictographs that tell a story organically and simply. For the “Strung with Everything” video we wanted to continue with this process to match the style of the band's live shows in a music video.” Animal Collective’s new album Time Skiffs, which also features the previously released tracks “Prester John” and “Walker,” is due out February 4.
Time Skiffs, the quartet’s first studio album in more than half a decade, feels like listening in on a conversation among four old friends, just as it felt during their inchoate early days or their Strawberry Jam heyday. These nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder, same as they ever were. There are harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective past 20, still in search of what’s next.
