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Listen to Panda Bear’s Excellent New Single, ‘Mr Noah’

Photo: Steven Dewall/Getty Images

Panda Bear, the chillest dude in Animal Collective (impressive feat!) and the non-cyborg voice heard on Daft Punk’s “Doin’ It Right,†released a new EP today. The four-song Mr Noah is available to stream on Spotify right now, and it comes in advance of forthcoming full-length album Panda Bear vs. The Grim Reaper, which will be out on January 13. I will go ahead and declare the album’s initial prognosis “very promisingâ€; when I saw him play a set of almost entirely new material last month, it was the least angry I have seen an audience get in a long time about someone not Playing the Hits. (Though, to be fair, I don’t think the two Venn diagram circles representing “Panda Bear fans†and “people who get visibly angry about things†actually touch.) With its big, God’s-pocket-change beat, the first single “Mr Noah†is definitely more percussive than the sound I usually associate with Noah Lennox, but it’s also got that creepy/childlike vibe that he’s always done very well. It sort of sounds like a playground chant drifting across an adjacent nuclear power-plant in a dubiously zoned part of town. I dig it.

Listen to Panda Bear’s Excellent New Single