Animal Collective celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark sixth studio album Feels with two new limited edition formats out today via Domino – almost 20 years to the date after the record’s original release on October 18th 2005. Ahead of the anniversary releases, the band today share a live video of Avey Tare, Deakin, and Geologist performing Feels track “Flesh Canoe” in 2023 at Eulogy in Asheville, North Carolina.
Feels 20th Anniversary is a reissue of the original album with a bonus disc featuring nine B-sides and previously unreleased demos and will be available on 3xLP, 2xCD, and digitally this Friday. FEELSLive 04/05 is a collection of audio recorded live to MiniDisc at shows from the era in 2004 and 2005 and will be available on cassette, MiniDisc, and digitally also this Friday. The band previously previewed Feels 20th Anniversary by releasing one of its bonus tracks, the recently unearthed demo version of “Grass.”
Avey Tare, Deakin, and Geologist will appear at Sonic Boom Records in Seattle – the city where Feels was recorded – for a Q&A alongside its mixer Scott Colburn; they will also be screening the short film Mixing Feels. The event starts at 5pm PT and admission is free. Additional film screenings will be held at Down In The Valley in Minneapolis, Harvest Records in Asheville, Park Ave in Orlando, Vinyl Veritas in Brooklyn, and Repo Records in Philadelphia. Full details on all events are available HERE.
Feels fell in the middle of Animal Collective’s extraordinary ascent in the early 2000s from indie experimentalists to one of contemporary music’s most original and influential artists; it followed the band’s 2004 breakthrough album Sung Tongsand preceded the records that would propel them to mainstream success, 2007’s Strawberry Jamand 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Recorded in Seattle with engineer Scott Colburn, Feels saw Animal Collective return to a quartet with Josh “Deakin” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz after Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox recorded Sung Tongs as a duo. Upon its release, Entertainment Weekly called Feels “breathlessly giddy and shamelessly trippy,” adding, “Somewhere up there, John Lennon and Timothy Leary are grinning.” “Feels gives hope to young bands who want to make beautiful noise but refuse to color within the lines,” wrote Rolling Stone. Pitchfork would eventually name the album one of the best of the 2000s, hailing its “sense of exuberance as big and as purposeless as a forest, sometimes joyfully savage and sometimes softly haunting, but always beyond genre or strategy or intention. Above all, it is what Animal Collective do with their voices here that astounds: whispering, shrieking, muttering, pleading, sighing, their sprite-like presence is somehow thoroughly alien and yet unnervingly intimate.”
Order Feels 20th Anniversary now on limited edition Translucent Grape 3xLP, 2xCD, and digitally. Order FEELSLive 04/05 on MiniDisc, cassette, and digitally.