Ends meet

Way back before the turn of the century in 1999, Release Magazine called Panda Bear’s self-titled debut “soft, fragile and remarkably sentimental” and compared it to “a rugged diamond waiting to be cut.”

Released in February, Sinister Grift is the eighth solo album by Panda Bear, aka Noah Lennox, who’s scheduled to play 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4 at Beer City Music Hall, 1141 NW Second St. Glide Magazine said Lennox’s latest album “feels like an old surf rock record your dad made but never mentioned, only to be discovered… while cleaning out the garage” while Pitchfork said, “Nearly every track on Sinister Grift feels like it could’ve been written at any point in the last 50 years.” 

In some ways, Pitchfork may be more than half right. In the press release announcing Sinister Grift, the album’s co-producer and Lennox’s current tourmate Deakin, aka Josh Dibb, said, “Working on this record felt like a sacred and warm return. Noah and I first started putting music down to multitrack cassette in 1991. … Sinister Grift feels like the songwriter I’ve known for over 30 years but also feels like some sort of new chapter for Noah.”

In those three decades, Lennox has collaborated with Daft Punk (Random Access Memories’ “Doin’ It Right”), Lennox and Dibb’s band Animal Collective was kinda-sorta quoted by Beyoncé (Lemonade’s “6 Inch” credits them as co-writers for an interpolation from Merriweather Post Pavilion’s “My Girls”), and Lennox’s sample-heavy classic Person Pitch has been influencing electronic indie rock since its 2007 release.

Depending on which of his touring band members make up the set list on Oct. 4, OKC audiences may be treated to songs from seven of the eight Panda Bear albums, but tracks from his debut won’t likely make the cut.  

“I don’t really like those,” Lennox said. “I mean, I don’t regret doing it, but it just feels like a different person. … I was so young. Some of those recordings, I was 14, 15 years old. It just sort of feels like I hadn’t found my thing yet.”

We woke up early to speak to Lennox in his adopted home of Lisbon, Portugal, about the tour, his creative process and what young Panda Bear would think of Sinister Grift. 

You said in an interview earlier this year that the Sinister Grift songs sounded different when you started playing them with a live band. Have they changed further on tour? 

Maybe a little bit. I feel like once we get a song kind of where we all like it, it doesn’t change a whole lot after that. We’re always trying to find links between songs that we can sort of join songs together … but I feel like the arrangements of the songs, once we feel really good about them, they don’t tend to change that much. We keep adding songs for every tour. So there’ll be a couple songs on the September tour that we haven’t played before.

The set lists for your shows recently feature a lot of the same songs, but the order seems to change frequently. Is that because you’re trying to find these links between songs?

Yeah, we do a different set list every night. Usually a different person will write the set list every night. Sometimes people just don’t want to do it, so I’ll pick up the slack. But for most shows, it’s a different person every night writing the set list. We can play about 26, 27 songs, so it’s pretty different night to night now.

There are songs from albums throughout your career on the set list. How did you go about choosing those songs?

It started by me asking everybody what songs they’d be interested in playing or what they thought might be good, and then we sort of whittled that down. There’s a couple that we tried to do that didn’t really come together … but we keep just sort of adding stuff. We try to do a cross section of everything. … Maybe Young Prayer there’s nothing and not the very first one, but Person Pitch onward, I think there’s at least a song from every release.

So you’re not revisiting the self-titled debut?

From Young Prayer on, I feel sort of a through line through everything, or there’s, like, a line I can trace through all, all that stuff. But [the debut] sort of sits as this sort of weird before-the-thing-was-created or before-the-thing-was-realized sort of thing. So it feels separate to me.

What do you think the artist that made your debut would think of Sinister Grift?

I don’t think they’d like it very much, and I think if I told that person that this is what they’d be making 40 years later or 30 years later, however long it is — a million years — I think they’d be really surprised. I thought about that while we were making it because Josh [Dibbs] and I reminisced a bunch about when we first started making recordings together when we were young teens and just how it was cool to note how the feeling at the end of the day, after you’ve finished working on something, that sort of feeling of satisfaction is very specific and I think very unique to doing this thing for us. It was cool to feel like that part of it hadn’t changed at all, but everything around that feeling has morphed over time. But it was cool to note that that part of it is really untouched and sort of pure in a way.

Does trying to do something different from what you’ve done before play a big part in your creative process?

It does, but it’s more of a subconscious thing. I think it’s because I just sort of don’t get as excited about something if I feel like it sounds like something I’ve done or it’s really obviously sort of like an extension of something that somebody else has done. If I can hear somebody else’s thing in it, I just sort of lose steam on it typically. I think it’s just a reflection of what I’m like as somebody who makes songs that I don’t operate that way. But it’s certainly not, like, a rule for me. It just kind of comes out that way.

Do you try to consciously change your approach to the creative process at all?

Yeah, that I’ll be a bit more mindful about, especially if the last thing I did I was using a guitar or just sort of the computer to make the thing. I like to start the process on something else. I find it really fun to work with something that maybe you feel like you don’t really have your sea legs totally with. I feel like you get more surprising results or you find yourself in places that maybe you didn’t expect, and that’s always exciting and it’s, like, inherently juicy.

Can you think of an example from Sinister Grift of that?

Well, I think the big thing on this one was kind of leaving the songs sort of straight up. I resisted it for a while, but I think two and a half weeks in or so, as we were listening to the mixes, it just didn’t feel like they needed to go anywhere else because my original idea was to sort of abstract everything. … I thought we’d spend a lot of time disassembling and blurring a lot of the sounds, but we just really came to like them a whole lot.

And that’s an important thing for me, too, is sort of following your nose with stuff. I like to have a blueprint, but I like to be able to throw away the blueprint if I feel like that’s where the thing wants to go. And this one was certainly a major example of that.

You’re touring with Deakin. Is he playing with your band as well?

We haven’t really talked about that. I don’t think so. I think we’ll do separate things. Maybe we can [play together] on a song or something. I always find it weird to have somebody come from the side of the stage while we’re doing the thing. It always feels like it breaks the magic or something. I usually don’t like that kind of thing, but maybe there will be a special moment for it.

This article appears in Fall Guide 2025.