Noah Lennox’s records as Panda Bear always sound like they’ve been recorded near the beach. His songs are constructed with the care and patience of a person unconcerned with time and the breezy goodwill that comes with spending a lot of time in the sun not doing much of anything. The stacked vocal harmonies and avant-pop collagism of 2007’s Person Pitch felt like a post-Endtroducing… version of Pet Sounds, and he’s flirted heavily with reggae; see the shoutout to King Tubby in Person Pitch’s liner notes or the 311ish digi-boing of “Crosswords,” from 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (an album whose title is itself a dub reference). But for most of Sinister Grift, his first solo release since 2019’s aquatic confessional Buoys, he goes full cowabunga: Lennox’s body’s in the sand, there’s a tropical drink melting in his hand, and he’s contemplating his crumbling love to the rhythm of a reggae-rock band.

Sinister Grift follows Lennox’s excellent 2022 collaboration with Sonic Boom, Reset. With its overlapping early rock and doo-wop samples, and some of Lennox’s sharpest melodies in years, that album felt both like a return to the heady days of Person Pitch and completely unbothered by the weight of expectation. Even as they dealt in heartbreak and loss, the songs were casual, at ease, nearly weightless. That same energy carries into Sinister Grift, which Lennox recorded in his Lisbon home studio with Animal Collective bandmate Deakin handling production. Avey Tare and Geologist also appear, making this the first solo album to feature all four members of Animal Collective; so does Lennox’s partner, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Raveda. If Sinister Grift often sounds like a bunch of old friends and loved ones getting together to jam while the meat sizzles on the grill, well, it is.

Their disarmingly laid-back approach marks Sinister Grift as the least experimental and most accessible record in the Animal Collective universe. On first spin, its relative simplicity makes it seem as though the album is lacking some of Lennox’s greatest tricks as an arranger. He long ago mastered the ability to both build and complicate tension (think of the way the breaks in “Brother Sport” are ratcheted up by the steady introduction of secondary and tertiary rhythms) and juice its release (“Matt!”). There are very few commanding polyrhythms here, and you’ll never be bricked out by clashing textures the way you might with, say, Tomboy’s “Surfer’s Hymn.” Amusingly, despite being rooted in reggae, Sinister Grift is the least dubby record Lennox has ever released, with echo, staccato repetitions, and decontextualized FX kept to a minimum. When a spring of noise finally uncorks in “Ferry Lady,” it doesn’t overwhelm the song but simply burbles in the margins, closer in spirit to the refined pop of “I Am the Walrus” than the disorienting misdirections of “Bros.”

By stripping away the experimentation, Sinister Grift is a reminder of something that’s always set Lennox apart: He’s an exceptionally gifted songwriter. Nearly every track on Sinister Grift feels like it could’ve been written at any point in the last 50 years—or even longer ago, in the case of the strolling Everly Brothers-style lament “Anywhere But Here.” “Praise” opens the album with a splash of reverbed snare and sets out on a soft skanking rhythm while sunshine-bright harmonies blast through, just a hint of minor-key cloud drifting in and out of the verse. “My heart, it bends before it breaks,” Lennox sings as the melody descends; Raveda responds, “Only wanna give it to you,” bringing the melody back up. The shape of their two-line call and response mimics the bend in the lyric, and as the song unfolds, Lennox’s narrator seems to grow more resilient, even as he waits for a troubled relationship to either flex back to center or shatter completely. “I’m moving and I’m watching how you do,” he sings, “again and again and again,” bouncing the latter line across his vocal range as if he’s not quite sure where he stands.

Sadness and regret lurk at the edges of Sinister Grift, and they grow as the album proceeds. Lennox’s narrators are caught up in uncertain futures, trying hard to find a way back to a romantic connection they suspect might be completely severed. A pedal steel guitar weeps behind the shimmering wah-wah shuffle of “50mg” as Lennox sings about the stony silences that seem to be the only thing he now shares with a partner. “Engines running, I can feel the miles,” he sings, the prism of harmonies around him shot through with the deep blues and violets of an island sunset. As darkness overtakes the album’s sunny demeanor in “Venom’s In” and especially “Elegy for Noah Lou,” the arrangements become more spare. The latter is the album’s most unadorned track, a lonesome six-minute sigh of velveteen pastoral folk that Lennox sings in a creamy tone, scooping to the bottom of his register in a graceful downward arc as he searches for terra firma, a dusting of reverb the only effect on his voice. It’s the kind of straightforward, plainly beautiful song a younger Panda Bear might have admired but wouldn’t have dared to try; its nakedness is startling.

The album’s somewhat uneasy relationship to its own lightness is part of its charm and central to its ethos; Lennox has never sounded so playful or at ease. In “Ends Meet,” he spits the word “gut” like it’s a watermelon seed, then takes the word “do” for a long walk, breaking his voice across a fluttering melody. In “50mg,” a song almost certainly named for a THC dose strong enough to wig out a normie for a week, his voice hacky-sacks the words “it’s gone” back and forth from left channel to right, a chilled-out take on the chop-chop vocal crossfades of Grim Reaper’s “Boys Latin.” He kicks off closer “Defense” by singing the title like he’s at a football game, then hands things over to Cindy Lee, who rips a guitar solo through the song’s middle.

On their respective records, both Lee and Lennox are enchanted by the past. Lee’s vision is of a place of consciously idealized, completely unreachable beauty that floods the present with melancholy. Lennox’s music has always positioned the past as alive and inspirational, a collection of voices one might approach in conversation as an equal or co-conspirator, which in turn makes the present feel euphoric and ripe with creative potential. By setting his own requiem to some of the most upbeat music of his career, Lennox tests the limits of that conviction. “I guess I’ll wait until the voices inside my mind are out of time,” he sings in “Anywhere But Here.” He might be falling apart, but that’s no cause for alarm. On Sinister Grift, Panda Bear is cool with chilling until things get better.