Sinister Grief is a misnomer of an album title given how much of a celebration of the Panda Bear canon it sounds like. The last time the music behind Noah Lennox’s songcraft sounded so subjectively in love with everything this life has to offer — even when it’s dark and tragic — was arguably 2011’s Tomboy, an effort born on the heels of his acclaimed 2007 effort Person Pitch. That album heard the Animal Collective member refining (descriptive cliché incoming…) the buoyant nautical experimental pop styling of its predecessor into a sound that was decidedly just pop in its crests.

Experimental reflexes never quite completely leave the creative water bodies of Lennox’s impulses, however, and since Tomboy, Lennox has endlessly remolded the shape of his solo work through varying tonal permutations and prism spectrums that have oft reflected seasons in his own life, informed greatly by death and a depth of existentialism wrought from it. At the end of its path, his latest and eight studio effort, Sinister Grief, feels like Lennox has properly reckoned with and broken free from morbidity’s shackles from defining his latter era’s work.

In a sense, he’s coming full circle in not only celebrating his own artistic life, but that of its extended limbs. All members of AnCo contributed in some shape or form to the listen — primarily with Deakin co-producing the effort — and new waves borne from his influence with help from Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede and the elusive Cindy Lee guest, as does his daughter, Nadja. Psychedelic contours blending into warm hues again reframe themselves more forthright in this cast, with its bubbling of pop hooks reflecting that of ’60s turntable glory where breezes of harmony and ethereal production transcended timelines.

Add in a spectrum of reggae, country western, and the stray reverberations of the extended AnCo multiverse’s uncanny synth-pop touching its surface, and it could only be a Panda Bear album. Despite the many lives and influences ebbing throughout, it all of it sticks together, as do the tunes commit themselves to your memory. If anything, all that grief preceding this up to point has been for the better.

Highlights: “Ends Meet”, “Elegy for Noah Lou”, “Defense”

Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift is available now on Domino Recording Co.

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