Panda Bear Breaks Down Six Perfectly Produced Albums and Songs
From Dean Blunt to King Tubby, these are the productions that inspire the indie-pop experimentalist most.
The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production.
The words blurred and obscured come up frequently in conversation with Noah Lennox, better known as Panda Bear, about his favored production style. He’ll write a song straightforwardly on guitar, then, inspired by his love for dub reggae, begin dismantling it, removing some elements and adding ghostly echo to others, until the final version is a whisper of its former self.
Sinister Grift, his fantastic latest album, is different. It begins with a snare roll, run through delay so that its repetitions extend like vapor trails behind it: an unusually straightforward homage to the Jamaican sounds that, along with choral music, he calls his most enduring inspiration. Then everything snaps into disarming clarity. The guitar sounds like a guitar, not a faded memory of one; the voice is right up front, sweet and otherworldly as always but newly clear and vulnerable. The Beach Boys have always been another easy reference point for Lennox’s solo work, but their influence has never been more direct. Where past Panda Bear albums have channeled some heavenly ideal of aching guitar pop with rich vocal harmonies, this one sometimes actually sounds like it could have been blasting out of someone’s radio on a boardwalk in the early 1960s.
But the influence doesn’t remain so straightforward for long. Soon enough, squelchy synth lines mushroom out from the crevasses of “50mg,” and “Left in the Cold” recedes to a dreamworld of digital reverb and ticking drum machines. These sounds will be familiar to fans of past Panda Bear reveries, but they arrive with a new sense of presence, even when they’re swathed in echo.
“I like to think of finding the sound of a new album like finding a new room in my house, or going to a room in my house that I don’t often go to,” Lennox says from his home in Lisbon. “It’s not this grand thing where I’m discovering music that no one has ever heard before. But I’m trying to explore territory within my own set of techniques and sensibilities that feels kind of new.”
Lennox recorded Sinister Grift with another Animal Collective bandmate, Josh Dibb aka Deakin, whose focus on lyrics and melody encouraged him to keep the music more upfront. They went into it thinking the production would involve lots of blurring and obscuring, but often found the songs were stronger with a scaled-back version of the signature Panda Bear approach. The record is full of uncanny juxtapositions between human warmth and digital cool. Rather than attempting to recreate the analog-driven sounds of the reggae and early rock’n’roll records that inspired them, they leaned into the sonic idiosyncrasies of the digital audio workstation—that is, the software, such as Pro Tools, at the heart of most modern recording setups—a decision that helps the album to feel contemporary even as it looks to the past. Lennox cites recent albums by ML Buch and Mk.gee as examples of a similar sound. “I know a lot of people who are very analog purist kind of people and I’m just not on that train,” he says. “This album feels very DAW, very plugin-y. You might not like it, you might prefer the analog sound, but there is something distinctive and cool about it.”
Below, Lennox discusses six albums and songs that have inspired him as a producer.
Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges: Clube Da Esquina
Producers: Milton Miranda, Lindolfo Gaya, Milton Nascimento
Panda Bear: This is my favorite production ever. It’s an impossibly large sound. There’s a lot of super hard-panned stuff, which helps, but it’s more than that. It’s something about the arrangement, the performances, the use of reverb very selectively. There’s sudden and severe shifts on it that feel kind of psychedelic to me. These surprising turns it takes, in really satisfying ways. It’s a target for me: I don’t always want stuff to sound exactly like this, but sometimes, for sure, I’m trying to match the width and the depth of this album.
Dave [Portner] and I worked at this record store Other Music in New York for four or five years, a tiny place that specialized in fringe music. And the people who worked on the floor there were the heaviest music people I’ve met, still to this day. I worked at a computer upstairs, just entering everything that came into the store into the system. They wouldn’t let me talk to people, they knew better than that. And you would take turns around the little office of who would get to put on the next thing. Hearing so much stuff in that environment helped me to develop a musical vocabulary. I’m sure this is one that was recommended to me or was put on at the shop.
Good Sad Happy Bad: “Shaded Tree”
Producers: Good Sad Happy Bad
I’m a huge fan of this band, and of Mica Levi generally. They do a lot of recording where they do jams together and then piece it together later. This track feels a bit more traditionally performed, but there’s other stuff of theirs that feels very edited, just a patchwork of audio files thrown together, and that’s inspiring to me. When you work that way, you might get more surprising results than in a more traditional process, more surreal and synthetic-sounding stuff.
Dub music underscores everything I do in some way or another, and there’s something about the giant shift between recording a band and the way they would process the sounds and make it into more of a soundscape. This otherworldly thing happens that really does it for me. And I think a process like this band’s is just another way of doing that, making something where your brain can tell that it can’t be “real.” Even on Sinister Grift, it has this very processed, very plugin sound—there’s something about the tones, the timbres, that the brain recognizes as something that’s been pieced together in an unnatural way. And again, dub music, of course—it’s a band playing, but then it’s taken to this heightened place, an alternate place. There’s something magic about that. It’s the relationship between the fake and the real that I find so satisfying.
King Tubby: “Cherry's Dub”
Producer: King Tubby
I could have probably chosen a hundred dub tracks, but there is something special about this one. It’s so blurred, but so beautiful to me. It helps that the OG song is really awesome too. This one is very watery, very dreamy. It instantly transports me to a different atmosphere, in the best way. It catches me right from the beginning, and I have to stop what I’m doing. That’s always the target with anything I’m making: If I open my eyes when I’m listening to the mix, or think about bills I’ve gotta pay, then it can still get better.
For Reset [Panda Bear’s 2022 collaboration with producer Sonic Boom], there’s a version where Adrian Sherwood did the dub. That was the first time I’d done that with my music. But I really like this idea that a song is a growing thing, it’s always changing. For me, it’s not usually through remixes or dubs, it’s mostly through live performance. There’s certain songs of mine that I keep coming back to, like “Preakness,” which I’ve done five or six different versions of, and there’s a new version we’re gonna do on this tour. There’s no definitive version. It’s just snapshots of the life of the song.
We tried really to find a way to open Sinister Grift that wasn’t so referential to dub. That snare roll was just a placeholder. The first time I played it for Rivka [Ravede, Lennox’s partner, who painted Sinister Grift’s cover and appears as a guest musician], she was like, Island time! I was like, I can’t just leave that there. We spent literal days trying to find some way to start the song that would be as good or better than that, and we never found it. So we just left it. It sort of fits, and I love dub so much, and perhaps in my old age I don’t have as much hangups about stuff like that. I just sort of let it go.
Maria Reis: “Coisas Do Passado”
Producers: Tomé Silva, Maria Reis
Maria is not only my favorite musician in Lisbon, but one of my favorite musicians anywhere. She’s a really cool songwriter. She and her partner Tomé are both in the Panda Bear band, and I feel lucky to have them.
This whole record is produced really cool, but this song I especially like. On the surface, it feels very simple, but if you really listen to it, there’s all these little details. Everything feels very purposeful. That was something I had in mind for Sinister Grift, for sure. Little things can make a big difference if your arrangement is super efficient and minimal. Any little tweak or sound can really dramatically change the flavor of the thing.
Eric Copeland: “Hey Worm”
Producer: Eric Copeland
Eric, Maria, Mica, Dean Blunt—they’re all kindred spirits for me. When I hear their stuff, it feels like it’s speaking the same language that I speak. It’s a mix of digital and natural elements, and doing a lot with a little. Any time I talk to Eric about what he’s using, it’s always a super simple setup, which I really like. With touring now, as it gets harder and harder to do it, one of the big directives I gave to the band was I don’t want a lot of gear. My guitar setup is mad simple.
Inspiration from music can take on a different character when you have a personal connection—where there’s baggage in the best way, and this whole narrative behind the thing. Especially if there are choices that they make in their work that might hit different if you know where it’s coming from. But I’d be a fan of Eric’s even if I didn’t know him.
There’s a playfulness in his music that I’m really inspired by. So much stuff feels so heavy-handed, like it’s taking itself super seriously. I don’t mean to say you can’t be good if you’re doing that kind of thing, but Eric’s music was so refreshing to me, because it was interested in having fun. It sounds so crazy to say, but why can’t music be fun?
Dean Blunt and A$AP Rocky: “Stoozy”
Producer: Dean Blunt
Like me, Dean Blunt is just somebody who can’t stop. At this point, making stuff is my proof that I’m alive. Any time I stop for a while, I feel lost or depressed. And I recognize that in him too. Presentation-wise, there’s often sort of a casual feeling to his stuff that I always really responded to. Especially all the early Hype Williams videos. It’s just so magnetic, and had this homemade, mysterious thing that I really gravitated toward.
This one with A$AP Rocky is a funny contrast, since A$AP is so big. I suppose Dean is really big at this point too. But the clashing of different worlds is really cool. To pull it off like that seems like an impossible trick, but he does everything so effortlessly. And the reverb on the MCing is not something you hear very often.
I’ve never spoken with him about it, but he definitely seems like me insofar as I don’t get hung up about sound quality very often. I don’t really care what mic I use, or what preamp. If it feels good, that’s what’s most important to me. I don’t care how it was done, I don’t care if there’s pops or clicks in it. If it has that thing I’m looking for, then it’s good. And I assume that Dean is coming at it from a similar place.
