Over nine years and eight albums of head‑spinning music, Baltimore‑born group Animal Collective have perfected their individual meld of psychedelia and electronica. Their latest and best offering to date, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is a dense, otherworldly record on which Beach Boys harmonies meet heavily treated instrumentation to produce an avant‑garde pop. The roots of its unique sonic character lie in the fact that the foursome were reduced to three in the wake of guitarist Josh Dibb aka Deakin's hiatus from the band.

Unusual in the sense that they write new material for tours, primarily, rather than for recording, the remaining trio — Dave Portner aka Avey Tare (vocals, keyboards, guitar), Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear (vocals, samples, percussion) and Brian Weitz aka Geologist (electronics) — were forced to rethink their methods when going back out on the road without Dibb, after the release of their previous album, 2007's Strawberry Jam.

"It made us have to write a lot, I guess,” says Portner. "We needed to find a new way of approaching having three people do as much, so we tried to do something different and use the samplers more.”

"There aren't a lot of rules in our songs,” Weitz points out. "We have effects processors on stage, and some nights if you're bored of doing the same thing you did the night before, you can try and play around with a different effect. Or trigger a loop differently to see how it works with timing. And occasionally those experiments on stage work and they make their way into the song.”