A ? of WHEN was inevitable. Reset, the 2022 album by longtime collaborators Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, was a joyful collection that felt like exactly what it was: the work of two wildly talented best bros riffing off one another’s strongest ideas. Enthusiasm was its defining characteristic: There’s Noah Lennox and Pete Kember’s mutual admiration, of course, but also their shared love of pre-British Invasion pop, complex vocal harmonies, and counterintuitive juxtapositions. Not many records could credibly birth both a dub version and a mariachi reimagining; Reset is not like most records.
With most of the juice finally squeezed from Reset, Lennox and Kember reconvened to figure out what else they might do. On their new album, the duo turns its attention to the downstream effects of living in a culture of convenience—not simply the intense impatience you feel when your item isn’t available for next-day shipping, but also the way that years of expecting instant change has corroded most of our souls. (That ethos extends to the album’s release: It’s only available to purchase via physical and digital formats, which makes the effort of seeking it out part of the experience.) While Reset was built from recordings of doo-wop and early rock, A ? of WHEN contains no samples. Instead, Lennox and Kember applied their collagist methodology to tapes they made of themselves and a few collaborators including harpist Mary Lattimore and Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez, the group behind the mariachi version of Reset.
Where Reset seemed to float in time, suggesting a pop-music afterlife, A ? of WHEN floats in space, airy and breathable, its 10 songs like patiently constructed terrariums you have to walk around to fully experience. There are so many sources of percussion in “Revive him,” and they’re all barely doing anything: Woodblocks that sound once or twice, a tinkle of processed sleigh bell, careful snare rolls that feel pulled from a 19th-century classical score. Cumulatively, they give the song a kind of rhythmic base, but they function more like the dots in a John Baldessari painting, dramatically complicating the texture with their simplicity. In “Something like dreaming,” Lattimore’s harp dangles with the slow twist of an infant’s mobile while a tamboura hums nearby like a white noise machine. A cumbia shuffle plays at an ignorable volume in opener “Never givin’ in”; technically, its rhythm is the song’s engine, but it cedes dynamic primacy to the harp and sporadic handclaps.
A ? of WHEN is about consequences—the way they can loom over the present, the work we do to disregard them, the certainty that ignoring one’s ghosts makes their eventual appearance that much more terrifying. “A simple kind of mess in my soul/I want to skip right over that part,” Lennox sings in “Revive him,” “but I can’t.” That last phrase is repeated over and over, both a warning and a cause for optimism; even as a surge of noise threatens to swallow his voice, it never quite disappears, the sunniness of the melody suggesting there’s a form of freedom in simply dealing with your bullshit. On a busier record, one more concerned with forward momentum, that idea would risk getting lost. On A ? of WHEN, the persistent drones and spacious production suspend pressure, a formal echo of the lyrical concern with accepting the shape of the present.
Lattimore’s harp and Kember’s dip-dip-dip baritone notwithstanding, no instrument on A ? of WHEN is so distinctive as Lennox’s steel drum. It pings throughout the album, sometimes lightly processed but largely in mufti, at ease in the context despite the lack of songs about frozen daiquiris. In “Lucky Charm,” the steel drum rolls around behind Lennox’s voice as he prays for intercession: “Lucky charm, guide me right/Horseshoes guide my fate tonight,” he sings. The latter line, in its phrasing and melody and even the musical tone of its words, is an almost perfect mimic of Santa Claus asking Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to guide his sleigh. Like so much of Panda Bear’s music, it feels nostalgic and rich with childlike wonder. The whole thing—steel drum, Rudolph—feels like a longing gaze into fantasies of chilled-out beach days and piles of presents, one that’s snapped back into reality by the greater concerns of the album.
Lennox and Kember are so good at playing these meta-textual tricks. They love to make you think you know how something will play out and then frustrate that expectation, something they do here over and over without it ever feeling tired: the beat that kicks off the nocturnal ballad “Something like dreaming” sounding like a back-masked “We Will Rock You,” the steel drums of “Pray to you” giving way to a loping cowboy song. In the title track, police sirens scream and a violent whoosh rips across the stereo channel while Kember cheerily exhorts you to “keep trying” over a crunchy power-pop guitar.
And yet, every sound feels naturally placed, as if by divine orchestration. Lennox’s approach to making records has been compared to that of Brian Wilson to the point of critical cliché, but here’s something you might not expect: A ? of WHEN is, formally if not aesthetically, closer to Pet Sounds than any other release in his catalog. Without the discordance and open structure that characterize much of Lennox and his Animal Collective bandmates’ work, it’s a piece of meaningful, open-hearted experimentation made from scratch, shaped into conventional pop and rendered accessible to just about anyone. While Lennox and Kember are lyrically focused on the impending darkness, A ? of WHEN is a reminder that fate can be a storm cloud on the horizon, but it’s also the author of everything else in the spacious, drifting, deceptively full sky.
