Photo Hisham Akira Bharoocha

At 22-minutes in length, “Defeat”, the initial single from Animal Collective’s 12th full-length effort, Isn’t It Now?, is like an album within an album by today’s standards, and an apt centerpiece reflective of the band’s evolution forward. Demands of the beholder’s time as do the creators’ own play into the veteran experimental art pop band’s insatiable creative journey here, continuing to warp in patterns that defy linearity all these years later — this particular listen gestating live for at least the past five — and here, toying with patience and realization across a two-part sensory epic. In its first, AnCo’s characteristic sensory abundance are given a wide lay of space to meander across fields of synthetic fog before reaching its interlude where everything blinkers to life. “Crawling from the serpent in the water / The mirror, the what have we become?,” Deakin and Avey Tare, vocals co-mingled, helm its existential inquiry before fading back into particle form, as does all matter, eventually. “Where did it change? Coming of age.” But instead, nearing closer to the inevitable end only seems to inspire the four to create something very other of themselves.

Animal Collective’s Isn’t It Now? will be released September 29th on Domino Recording Co.