Animal Collective: Isn’t It Now? Album Review

For nearly as long as Animal Collective have been a band, they have reserved some of their best material for follow-up EPs. They may have originated as leftovers, but each stands on its own as a body of work. Isn’t It Now? is a full-length—in fact, at 65 minutes, it’s the longest album they’ve ever made—but it seems of a piece with those compact and giftlike interstitial releases. It arrives a year and a half after the late-career triumph Time Skiffs and features material from the same batch of songs, composed just before the pandemic, that populated that record. Two decades into a career full of left turns, it is perhaps the Animal Collective album that sounds the most like the one before it. But if anyone has earned the right to settle into a particular lane for a while, it’s Animal Collective. Isn’t It Now? demonstrates that they needn’t constantly reinvent themselves in order to make deep and rewarding music.

On Isn’t It Now?, as on Time Skiffs, Animal Collective present themselves as something like a rock band. There are guitars, electric bass, and a full drum kit, rather than a ragtag assemblage of floor toms and sampler pads. For the first time since Feels or so, piano plays a central role, and not a piano that’s been distorted beyond recognition or looped infinitely through a delay pedal, but a regular old piano. The songs have adult concerns: “Defeat” and “Stride Rite” are odes to acceptance and perseverance; “Gem & I” namechecks simple pleasures like seeing the sun and cracking another beer; “Magicians From Baltimore” is about a hometown you love but had to leave. Accordingly, the band has toned down its most antic musical impulses. No screams, no sudden explosions of noise. The crescendos, when they happen, are subtle and patient. The tempos, like the volume level, are easygoing.

Within that limited dynamic range, Animal Collective remain a spectacularly creative band. This mellower zone suits them: On albums like Centipede Hz and Painting With, the overstimulation that characterized their groundbreaking earlier work was showing signs of wear; in this most recent period, it’s as if they’d challenged themselves to reach listeners without relying on that playbook. Sometimes, that means making use of idioms outside the insular Animal Collective world. “Stride Rite,” for instance, is a contender for the most straight-up normal song in their catalog. Elegant and candlelit, featuring a rare Deakin lead vocal, it reminds me of something you’d hear on a singer-songwriter album from the twilight of the hippie era, where the protagonist is trying to piece together a meaningful story about what’s next after the utopian dream has fizzled out. “Let’s invite all the songs that we wrote so we’d know/And let them go,” he sings, with a melodic leap at the end that sounds like some combination of regret and hopeful anticipation. Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s songs tend to be so wrapped up in their respective idiosyncrasies as writers and singers that it’s difficult to imagine other people delivering them convincingly. If Deakin’s sensibility is a little more traditional, it’s also a little more universal: “Stride Rite” feels like it could belong to anyone, including you.