Panda Bear Breaks Down Six Perfectly Produced Albums and Songs

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.