Best Ever
Experimental Rock Album?

There’s a moment two minutes into “The Purple Bottle” where Avey Tare’s voice cracks on the word “you” and the song suddenly stops being a song. It becomes a confession, a giddy admission of infatuation so overwhelming that the singer can barely contain it within the structure he’s built. The drums keep their manic pace. The guitars keep their chiming repetition. But something has shifted—the architecture is the same, but now it’s holding actual feeling rather than just the idea of feeling.

This is what Feels does across its fifty minutes: it takes Animal Collective’s established vocabulary of loops and drones and yelped vocals and makes it serve emotion rather than texture. The Baltimore quartet had spent their first several albums building a reputation as the American inheritors of psychedelia’s weirder traditions—Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Sung Tongs were praised for their adventurousness, their willingness to let songs dissolve into ambient drift or erupt into cacophonous overload. But Feels, released in October 2005, proposed something more radical: what if the experiments could also be love songs?

“Did You See the Words” opens the album with what sounds like a field recording of some impossible forest—birds and insects and rustling undergrowth that turns out to be guitars and synthesizers mimicking organic processes. When the beat enters, it’s less rhythm than pulse, the sound of blood moving through the body. Panda Bear’s harmonies float above Avey Tare’s lead like temperature layers in summer air. The lyrics are impressionistic, image-based, but the feeling is unmistakable: this is joy, the specific joy of perceiving the world alongside someone you love.

The production, handled by the band with longtime collaborator Scott Colburn, achieves a paradox: it sounds both handmade and huge. Individual elements retain their rough edges—you can hear fingers on guitar strings, breath before vocals, the room where the drums were recorded. But these intimate details exist within a mix that seems to expand infinitely outward, each song creating its own acoustic space. “Grass” builds from gentle strum to overwhelming crescendo without ever feeling like it’s trying to be overwhelming; the intensity emerges organically, like weather.

Avey Tare and Panda Bear had been collaborating since childhood, their vocal interplay developed over years of basement experiments and small-venue performances. On Feels, that interplay reaches its apex. They don’t harmonize in conventional ways—instead, they occupy adjacent spaces, their voices brushing against each other like bodies in a crowd. The effect is communal rather than virtuosic: you’re not admiring technique but feeling included in a conversation.

“Banshee Beat” closes the album with nine minutes that justify the entire enterprise. The song begins in what sounds like aftermath—slow, exhausted, working through something painful. Panda Bear’s vocal melody circles the same few notes, unwilling or unable to resolve. But gradually, incrementally, the texture thickens. Guitars layer. Drums materialize. And at the five-minute mark, everything lifts—not into triumph exactly, but into something like acceptance, the recognition that pain and joy aren’t opposites but aspects of the same capacity to feel.

The album’s title is its thesis. Feels isn’t describing emotions; it’s describing the capacity for emotion, the raw nerve that art can touch when it stops protecting itself with irony or complexity. Animal Collective had always been technically adventurous; here, they became emotionally adventurous too, risking sincerity in a scene that often treated sincerity as naïve.

The timing mattered. In 2005, indie rock was deep in its post-punk revival phase—angular guitars, detached vocals, studied coolness. Feels proposed an alternative: what if weird could also be warm? What if experimental meant experimenting with vulnerability as much as with sound? The influence spread slowly but thoroughly; you can hear it in Fleet Foxes’ harmonies, in Bon Iver’s textural density, in Panda Bear’s own Person Pitch, which would push these ideas even further.

But Feels remains the purest statement. It’s an album about love made by people who understood that love is strange—that it distorts perception, disrupts routine, makes the familiar unfamiliar. The sounds Animal Collective had been developing for years turned out to be perfect for this subject. When you’re in love, the world does sound like “The Purple Bottle”: too fast, too bright, impossible to process but impossible to ignore. Feels captured that sensation and held it for fifty minutes. It still hasn’t let go.

Decide for Yourself:

• The original Fat Cat vinyl pressing captures the album’s dynamic range better than most digital versions—the quiet passages stay quiet, the swells actually swell.
• The Domino reissue on colored vinyl brought the album back to print after years of scarcity.
• Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, released two years later, extends the Feels aesthetic into sample-based territory.