Animal Collective Break Curses

If there's an absolute wildcard at Sunday's Rogers Picnic, it's indie rockers Animal Collective, who are slotted to play between Brooklyn, N.Y. buzz band Vampire Weekend and Montreal electro-sleazoids Chromeo. 

Animal Collective are still playing a set constructed around material from their next album, which, as frontman Avey Tare (real name Dave Portner) tells us below, has been recorded and should be mixed this month. But you'll also hear cuts from career-making albums Strawberry Jam, Sung Tongs and Feels in the mix, which makes them one of the can't-miss acts of the one-day festival at Toronto's Fort York. 

We talked to Tare last month about Animal Collective's Water Curses EP and what's up next for the band. 

ChartAttack: The Water Curses material was recorded during the sessions for Strawberry Jam. Why didn't those songs end up on the full-length?
Avey Tare: There were a couple reasons. Maybe we didn't have enough time to finish mixing those songs, but we sort of prioritize what we think are the strongest tracks for any given record. So it's not like we thought they were shitty songs. We actually liked them a lot and some of us really wanted certain songs, like "Cobwebs," to go on Strawberry Jam. But we took a really long time to mix Strawberry Jam because it didn't come together so fast the first time we tried, and I think taking so long to hear the songs together and not having an easy time mixing the Water Curses songs just let us see that the songs on Strawberry Jam just fit the best together. It was all more upbeat songs on Strawberry Jam, and the ones on Water Curses are a little more dark and spacious. We wanted to devote an EP to them even at that time.  

So is everything you did around that time out there?
Yeah, it's all done. Everything we recorded in Tucson is released now. 

Has Josh (Dibb, a.k.a. Deakin, guitar) been playing with you guys on your live dates this year?
No. From touring, he's still taking off, just because we've been working on songs we wrote as a three-piece all this year and just progressing them on tour. So we won't really start playing as a three-piece live until we starting working on something new again. And I think, just because our new record isn't out yet, we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. 

Have you recorded the new material you've been working on?
We recorded a bunch of songs in February and we'll mix them next month. But there's no other plans. We recorded about 14 songs and we're not sure what will go on the record. 

Any idea when it might come out?
Not for a little while. Not this year. 

The last time we spoke, a couple of years ago, you talked about slowing things down a bit. Does waiting it out a bit go along with that?
It's hard to say. I'd personally want to put it out a bit sooner, but I kind of always feel that way because we work on songs for a really long time these days. So I feel like I get to a point, or maybe we all get to a point, where we play them enough that it just makes sense to put them out after a while. But I guess working with other people who have other ideas about releases, you have to kind of find the best way of doing things. 

The sets you're playing now lean on what's on the next album, right?
It's a little bit of the past few albums plus, yeah, new stuff. We're doing some Strawberry Jam stuff, some Feels stuff, some Sung Tongs stuff. 

Are these maybe the most career-spanning sets you've ever done?
Yeah, probably. It definitely all has a very different feel to it. It feels very modern to us. It doesn't feel like we're rehashing an old song and doing it as it was on the record. It feels very current. The sets are very cohesive in that everything that's played, we want it all to fit together. So we try to rework the old songs to make them make sense with the new ones. 

Will the songs flow into each other on the next album, or will it have a more traditional structure?
I guess a lot of that will come down to mixing. A lot of the songs that we have recorded and have been playing live have kind of longer intros and longer endings, so maybe some songs will have some segues, but it's hard to say before we mix. 

So what's next? You mix the record and then what, some time off?
We're probably not taking too much time off. We kind of always like to have a little time off when we're working — little bursts. It works better for us to maybe stop working, tour for no more than a month, then take some time off, then record or write something together. So there's never really a long time off. I think maybe in the winter we'll have a little bit of time off. But we're also working on writing a bunch of stuff that's just for a visual project we're working on with our friend Danny Perez, who did the "Who Could Win A Rabbit" video. He's just an old friend of ours, and we like a lot of the visual stuff he's doing, so we planned at this point almost two years ago to start filming and making music for this more visual record, or something like that. It was based on a lot of our ideas, visually, but then in conversations that we had, he kind of added on to them and wrote scenarios out and plotted it all out to be filmed. And then we figured after he edited everything, we'd compose the music to go along with it. The music is just stuff for the video. It's not stuff we'll play live. Hopefully, it'll be out next year. It's been a long time coming.