Photo by Allison Murphy

Follow the cobblestone streets of Lisbon into the party district on a quiet afternoon when the restaurants are closed and the laundry is out, then listen. Floating in the air around the tram cables, it might be possible to hear a voice singing. The songs are in English and the voice is sweet, but sometimes it breaks down into non-language. “Aaa-yay-yay!” it may chant ecstatically, or perhaps deliver a few slivers of wordless cooing. Other times, it jumps octaves mid-phrase. Given the debaucheries that occur when the sun goes down, it’s hard to imagine that the neighbors mind terribly about a little weird vocalizing every now and again, though it would be interesting to hear what they make of it.

“I’m pretty sure everyone out in the street can hear me,” says the source of the voice, a 36-year-old American named Noah Lennox, who sometimes
performs under the nom-de-fur Panda Bear. “It’s embarrassing. The neighborhood is tightly wound and the streets are really narrow, so the way sound
travels is strange. After about 10 minutes, I usually forget about it, though,” he says and pauses. “My daughter’s pretty embarrassed by the work set-up.” She is nine.

Lennox hears what others don’t while he’s recording music in his apartment and especially what those on the street outside can’t. It’s a world that comes
rushing back whenever he slips on the studio-grade headphones. The cobblestones, the apartment, everything else—even Lennox’s family—melts away. In the soundsphere where Lennox spends many hours of his waking life, beats thump, synth tones color a domed sky, bleeps ricochet and his voice soars angelic, sometimes in harmony with itself, making perfect sense amid the pulsating aural foliage. Call it virtual surreality.

Performing by himself and also with his hometown Baltimore buddies in Animal Collective since 1999, Lennox’s music has become synonymous with a very particular variety of contemporary psychedelia and très chic bro-dom. His work both as a solo artist and with Animal Collective is widely imitated—the outward trappings of their jittery rhythms and jarring interruptions, and his sweet melodies are now part of indie’s lingua franca. Bear’s CV includes an appearance on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and three wildly successful solo albums. His stature is such that when one Googles “panda bear,” Lennox’s Wikipedia entry appears above the eternally cute and fuzzy Asian creature.

In the 15 years since their formation, the four Collectivists—besides Mr. Bear: Avey Tare, Geologist and Deakin—have released some 18 full-lengths together and apart, counting their 2010 “visual album” ODDSAC. The latest is Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, a 13-track long-player reaffirming Lennox’s (and the collective Animals’) primally futuristic trinity of beautiful melodies, popping beats and layers of obfuscation.

“That’s probably a good way to think of it,” Lennox says of the tension between weirdness and accessibility. “I like moments of confusion when I’m listening to someone. But if you’re going to have a piece of music that [takes time to] figure out over weeks and months, unless you have an immediate response, [a listener] might not take the time to do that. I think it’s advantageous to have something for people to hold onto immediately.” It helps that good melodies sell records, but it helps even more that Noah Lennox is exceptionally good at writing melodies, and Grim Reaper is full of them.

Besides the techno-sonic reverb gloopery, Grim Reaper was produced under layers of secrecy, its final mixes tweaked to perfection while journalists signed embargoes to keep mum about the album’s mere existence. It’s a lot of hullaballoo for some music made in an apartment in Lisbon, but a new Panda Bear album is big news in what writer Bill Wasik dubbed the “hipster archipelago.” Since at least 2004’s hushed and revered Young Prayer, Lennox has been at the forefront of the ongoing slow-motion collision of popular culture and the avant-garde: a very weird band that got relatively big. Many of the songs on Grim Reaper made their New York debuts at an appearance during a music festival that’s branded by a certain energy drink.

When Lennox takes the stage in Williamsburg on a return trip through Brooklyn during the first days of fall, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper still does not exist in any tangible form—its mixes completed only weeks earlier, its name only a semi-confirmed rumor on the Internet. “Hey, everybody,” Lennox
says as he slides into place behind a sampler. Behind him, there is a large projection screen. Two bright lights at either side of the stage, positioned on
stands, point directly at the audience. It is a most mundane of greetings, but Lennox receives a sharp cheer in return, the kind of electric crackle that greets a musician who is not only beloved, but is also in the full flush of public adulation.

The screen powers up, a rear-projected canvas for longtime Animal Collective collaborator Danny Perez, director of the band’s feature film ODDSAC. Clouds appear and are subsumed in a torrent of melting mouths and pulsing strawberries. Lennox begins with a new song, “Sequential Circuits,” Grim Reaper’s opening track. The crowd doesn’t know it, but they’re right there along with him. One song blends into another and into another, Lennox adjusting filters to pull off butter-smooth segues that are one-part DJ transition, one-part Grateful Dead jam-peak. He throws in numbers from his earlier solo albums and people mouth the words, but the emphasis is on songs that almost no one in the room has heard before, unless via live recording or stray YouTube clip. Given the vibrations of the crowd, though, that’s probably exactly what many have already done.

At one point, Perez projects a kaleidoscope of writhing nekkid android ladies, as one does. As the show progresses, there are massive bass bombs and occasional blinding flashes from the stageside strobes, and the combination of bright lights and surreal images and nerve-jangling volume makes the stage seem like it is sitting on some other plane—the roof of the venue blown open to star-shine and galactic splatter.

But mostly, Lennox just stands there. He adjusts knobs and faders with a cool, focused precision, his emotion saved for his singing. During those moments, he takes on the visage of every pop heart-throbber ever, eyes closed, sincerity rippling through his fur. Perhaps the most exquisite song comes midway through the set, as it does on Grim Reaper, and is called “Tropic Of Cancer.” Lennox sings over a cascading loop of harp and the occasional sound of lapping waves. It is a song that could be recreated, in theory, by Lennox on a stage with a harpist, which is also to say that it is a song that could have been written anytime since the invention of the modern concert harp in the 19th century. There aren’t any overtly digital accoutrements, but the mechanical precision of the harp’s loop, Lennox’s layered vocal arrangement and especially a dropping melodic turn in the chorus make it a song that could only have been written by him and him alone. The show ends with the sound of breaking waves.

“It’s a different atmosphere when not everybody is familiar with the material,” he says the day after the Williamsburg show, sitting in Tompkins Square Park on New York’s Lower East Side. “It’s more of a fresh, no-expectations vibe. I like the kind of things that seem to happen, sometimes in a negative way. Maybe someone’s not able to engage with the music, or there’s nothing to grab onto. There’s a challenge to it that can pay off sometimes, especially in a festival atmosphere. When things go right there, it can be really powerful.” Lennox recalls a night at the Primavera Sound Festival in Spain when he and the Animals performed a slew of material from the yet-to-be-recorded Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Lennox has been playing the Grim Reaper songs live for some months, and they’ve already started to firm up and fall into certain patterns in his setlists. There’ll be another tour when the album comes out, but there might well be new songs by then, too. Even as they firm up, though, the songs share the same general properties as “Tropic Of Cancer”: Though there are beats and melodies, they remain structurally bizarre and stand a good chance of continuing to sound weird into the distant future.

Musicians, especially those in successful cult bands, tend to normalize over a long period of time, like the faces of youth hardening. After two or three albums, sometimes it might be possible to hear through the accoutrements of contemporary experimentation to the totally traditional band underneath, who
will probably wind up playing acoustic or with a string section or horns sometime soon. Animal Collective don’t seem to be like that. While “Tropic Of Cancer” could be performed with a live harpist, it’s not a direction that one expects from Panda Bear or any member of the band, though stranger things have happened, and Animal Collective have certainly proved their fondness for the strange. It probably would sound pretty cool.

But Animal Collective are a band that gained success and only grew weirder. Besides ODDSAC, there was also Transverse Temporal Gyrus, an installation at New York’s Guggenheim that involved Perez broadcasting images onto the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous rotunda while fragments of new music played. The band, dressed in unsettling costumery and masks, stood stock still on pedestals on the museum’s floor. It was, like, totally weird.

And there’s more weirdness to come on every horizon. Lennox is always working, even when on vacation. Over the summer, he and his wife—the Portuguese fashion designer Fernanda Pereira—and their two young children traveled to the beaches on the south coast of Portugal, near the Spanish border. “Vacation with the kids is not the same as vacation solo, but it was awesome,” he says.

He continues: “I got a high fever down there. It was unpleasant, but I sort of like that weird fever state, as long as it doesn’t stick around too long. I’ll often have ideas. I’ll think about musical things a lot in those moments.” With his new solo album almost done, Lennox’s fever dreams—fever dreams that might someday line the Guggenheim—took a different shape.

“This time when I was sick, I was actually thinking about stuff to do with Animal Collective, new set-ups or new types of songs…” he says, drifting off, perhaps flashing back to the fever dream, perhaps flashing forward to the next time he might slip on some headphones, perhaps just wondering what it all might sound like.