Feels – 20th Anniversary

Animal Collective celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark sixth studio album. Feels 20th Anniversary is a reissue of the original album with a bonus disc featuring nine B-sides and previously unreleased demos and is available on 3xLP and 2xCD. Feels fell in the middle of Animal Collective’s extraordinary ascent in the early 2000s from indie experimentalists to one of contemporary music’s most original and influential artists; it followed the band’s 2004 breakthrough album Sung Tongs and preceded the records that would propel them to mainstream success, 2007’s Strawberry Jam and 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Recorded in Seattle with engineer Scott Colburn, Feels saw Animal Collective return to a quartet with Josh “Deakin” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz after Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox recorded Sung Tongs as a duo. Upon its release, Entertainment Weekly called Feels “breathlessly giddy and shamelessly trippy,” adding, “Somewhere up there, John Lennon and Timothy Leary are grinning.” “Feels gives hope to young bands who want to make beautiful noise but refuse to color within the lines,” wrote Rolling Stone. Pitchfork would eventually name the album one of the best of the 2000s, hailing its “sense of exuberance as big and as purposeless as a forest, sometimes joyfully savage and sometimes softly haunting, but always beyond genre or strategy or intention. Above all, it is what Animal Collective do with their voices here that astounds: whispering, shrieking, muttering, pleading, sighing, their sprite-like presence is somehow thoroughly alien and yet unnervingly intimate.”