Animal Collective

Animal Collective come out of Baltimore County, Maryland, where Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Geologist (Brian Weitz) and Deakin (Josh Dibb) were schoolmates who began making recordings in shifting combinations while still young. In 1999 they set up their own label, Paw Tracks, which put out what now counts as their debut, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, in 2000, but the collective wasn't official until all four came together on the 2003 album now titled Ark. Any record under the name can feature any or all of them, and Deakin often steps away without ever really leaving.

What they do is hard to pin down and that's the point: psychedelia, freak folk, noise and electronica, built from loops, drones, samples, sound collage and big, choir-like vocal harmonies. Strawberry Jam, in 2007, with "Peacebone" and "Fireworks", was the first to make the Billboard 200, a glittering, yelping, joyous racket.

Then Merriweather Post Pavilion, in 2009, threw open the doors. It reached number 13 in the US and remains their biggest album, a warm bath of reverb and psychedelic pop in which "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" sound like hymns for a block party on another planet. Its sound went on to shape a lot of the independent music that followed over the next decade.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.