Animal Collective Already Recording Next LP

So Merriweather Post Pavilion has already booked its podium place as Album Of The Year, has it? Not if the competition has anything to do with it, and among the 40,000 other albums set to be released this year will be... another Animal Collective contender.

In an exclusive interview with The Skinny, AC founder Geologist (Brian Weitz to his Ma & Pa) revealed that their next release is already nearly complete. "We've been working on the next project, all four of us, throughout the course of making this record [MPP] and Strawberry Jam" Geo told us over the phone on Wednesday.

"We've been working on a project where we're composing music for an abstract film. That will be the next proper Animal Collective release we hope. All the visuals are done and all the music's been composed. We recorded about half of it in December, we were supposed to record the whole thing but there was an ice storm in upstate New York where we were, it knocked the power out of the studio for a few days. But we're gonna go back to it next month after this tour is over and hopefully finish it then."

But Geo warned that the forthcoming soundtrack had very different musical aims from the hugely acclaimed new record: "I dont know if everyone who's coming on board with Post Pavilion will really be open to it. It's a pretty experimental process for us, sometimes if the music is going with visuals then there isn't a song structure in it at all, it's more like abstract sound design. Sometimes there are - it's half-and-half between that, and new songs in the traditional sense. The film's being made by a friend of ours who's a director, we've been doing it simultaneously. That was a process we wanted, an experiment, a challenge, to see if we could each create something together, create it simultaneously as if they're inextricably linked the whole way through."

Look out for more from the interview in an upcoming issue of The Skinny. In the meantime, go listen to that very, very, very good new album that's just come out. Y'know - the Magic Eye one - what's it called?