Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Chris Shonting

MP Sinister Grift is your cleanest, most straightforward album, without the swampy digital textures of your previous work, but it’s not an “unplugged” album. It has a blend of virtual and natural elements that reminds me of recent work by artists like Mica Levi and ML Buch. What inspired the sound of the record?

PB I might also include somebody like Dean Blunt in that list, I feel like there’s a handful of us all exploring similar ground these days. The original intention was to do these recordings with a very straight-ahead setup of drums, bass, guitar, and singing, then to abstract them in various ways. With a song like “Elegy for Noah Lou”, you can kind of see how I thought the whole thing would sound. But as I worked with the arrangements with the producer Josh Dibb, and spent a lot of time trying to get the instruments to sit in the right place, we felt like they didn’t need to grow into anything else. I see Sinister Grift and my 2019 album Buoys as inverse images of each other: they’re both guitar albums and they’re both heavily processed. On Buoys, the processing served to destroy the natural sides of the music. On this one, the processing serves to heighten that sense of naturalness, but it’s still got a very synthetic quality to me.

MP When you made Buoys, you mentioned that you were working from a sonic palette that could be understood by your children, using elements of trap and reggaeton even if the songs didn’t necessarily resemble those genres. Is Sinister Grift operating from a similar musical space? Are you angling it toward the same audience?

PB I hope it can be appreciated by anybody, but I definitely hear a lot of dub reggae and classic rock in it. The latter is a style of music I’ve been a fan of since I was young, I just never noticed it coming out in the music I made until now. 

MP Incorporating elements of dub reggae is a constant across all of your releases. What appeals to you about the genre?

PB Dub feels immediately supernatural to me because it has a natural quality, where you can hear the drums and other instruments, but through studio trickery, it’s also being tweaked constantly, in a way that your brain recognises that this isn’t something that can be played “organically”. It gives it this surreal, dreamlike quality that I love.

MP The album is intentionally split between a poppier side A and a more despairing, harrowing side B. Some of the slower tracks on side B had a subterranean vibe that weirdly reminded me of the Odyssey, in the book where Odysseus and his men voyage to the underworld.

PB It’s funny you mentioned the Odyssey. Are you familiar with the hero’s journey? There was a moment where the sequence started to fit that mould, where everything starts off well, before signs emerge that maybe everything isn’t going so well. There’s a fall from grace and a journey through the wasteland, before arriving at a resolution at the end. Once I had that structure in place, it was a matter of rearranging a few songs.

MP With the melancholy of its lyrics and the unvarnished production of this album, it has certain evocations of “confessional” songwriting. Did this inform the album’s feel, or were you trying to avoid those signifiers?

PB I was definitely mindful of them. I was a big fan of Emily Dickinson in high school, and that raw, simple language and vulnerable, earnest form of expression still carries through to now. I used to be less concerned with that kind of vulnerability, I would let it all come out. I’m more guarded than I used to be. Ever since my 2015 album Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper, I’ve been less into making music that feels specifically mine or like an expression that is wholly unique to me. A lot of times, I’ll make up characters or tweak things. There are always pieces of me in there, expressions that feel real and meaningful, but it’s more of a hybrid mythology between real me and fake me.

MP I imagine using “Panda Bear”, as opposed to your birth name Noah Lennox, adds to a sense of hybridity.

PB When you’re listening to an artist or a band, you create this idea of who they are in your head. It’s a projection, one that’s rarely accurate. I’m as guilty of this as anybody.

MP “Elegy for Noah Lou” is at the core of the album, and one of the loneliest, saddest songs you’ve made. How did it come together? Was it a difficult song to record?

PB A friend of mine was making a movie, and he wanted a piece of music for a scene featuring an amateur musician. My friend asked for something not that great, almost a little embarrassing in how earnest it was. He sent me Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” and a Jackson C. Frank song as references, but he wanted a really crude, bad version of those songs. It’s funny: I made this song that was supposed to be ugly, almost like a costume, not expressing anything of myself, but eventually, it flipped into something super meaningful for me. The title has nothing to do with the subject matter of the song. I was trying to honour the child of a friend of mine who had died. His name was Noah and he was in my thoughts a lot while I was making the song. I asked my friends if I could title it like that as a remembrance of him.

MP How did your collaboration from last year with Jamie xx, “Daffodil”, come about?

PB The request came through my manager that Jamie was looking for a bunch of different people to contribute little sections to a song he was working on, so I had a go. That was probably four years ago, and I assumed nothing would ever come of it, but I’m happy it did.

MP Across your career, has there been a feeling or a question that you’ve been circulating, trying to answer?

PB I think there is, but I couldn’t tell you what it is. I think if I could, you’d know me completely.  I hope that all my music gives little clues as to my character or my experience. All my music is aimed at answering that question, but maybe it’s something that can’t be answered. .

Panda Bear will be performing at LIDO Festival on 7 June.