Time Skiffs

In late 2017, after wrapping up touring for Painting With (2016), the band was offered to play a show in at New Orleans' Music Box Village, an interactive arts venue. Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), who was busy at the time in Europe, was unable to attend, so David Portner (Avey Tare), Brian Weitz (Geologist), and Josh Dibb (Deakin) prepared material for the upcoming performance. The two-night installation, which took place on March 16–17, 2018, included early versions of the songs "Prester John" and "Royal and Desire". In summer 2019, all four band members rented a house together in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee to develop material for a forthcoming record. It was here that they workshopped songs for nearly a month, eventually writing upwards of 20 tracks. After the fall tour, the group prepared to enter the studio in March 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to these plans, and the band was forced to push back their recording sessions. After being content with how the EP came out, the band, at the persistence of their manager, and mastered by Heba Kadry. ==Music==

Domino's press release compared the album's sound to the band's seventh album Strawberry Jam as well as their "inchoate early days". Domino called the songs "love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry ... rendered with Animal Collective's singular sense of exploratory wonder". "Walker," written primarily by Panda Bear, is a tribute to Scott Walker, who died in 2019, around the time of the song's conception. "Strung with Everything" runs nearly seven minutes; Stereogum called it "as woozy and splashy as you'd expect from Animal Collective, but the melody is fairly sharp and straightforward, and it's got a bit of a playful Paul Simon thing going on". ==Release==

Time Skiffs was released on February 4, 2022, on Domino Records. Animal Collective teased the album though cryptic photos sent as private messages to fans of the band on Instagram, Reddit, and Discord. Put together, those images form the back cover of the album, complete with track listing and Domino logo. On October 20, the album was formally announced by the band and the label, along with the release of lead single "Prester John" and its music video. The band will support the album with a North American tour scheduled for March 2022. A second single, "Walker", was released on December 13, 2021. ==Critical reception==

Time Skiffs was released to positive reviews from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 76, based on 25 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". ==Track listing==

• "Cherokee" contains a sample of "To You, Sweetheart, Aloha", as performed by Alfred Apaka & his Hawaiians, written by Harry Owens. ==Personnel==

Credits adapted from the press kit for the album. Animal Collective • Avey Tare – vocals (all tracks), bass guitar (1–4, 6–8), autoharp (1), electric guitar (1, 2, 6, 9), Elektron synthesizer (2, 3, 6, 7, 9), Moog synthesizer (2), percussion (2), pedal steel guitar (4), wooden xylophone (5, 7), Waldorf Pulse synthesizer (5, 6), melodica (6), samples (6), fretless banjo (6), recorder (9) • Deakin – Nord synthesizer (1–4, 6–9), vocals (1, 3–9), acoustic guitar (4), electric guitar (4), piano (4, 9), bass guitar (5) • Geologist – Eurorack synthesizer (all tracks), Iris synthesizer (1–7, 9), samples (1–6, 9), Nord synthesizer (1, 4), lap steel guitar (1), Moog synthesizer (2, 7, 8), hurdy-gurdy (2, 3, 5–8), gong (2, 4, 6), field recordings (3, 7), taishōgoto (6, 7, 8) • Panda Bear – drums (all tracks), vocals (all tracks), samples (4, 6) Technical • Animal Collective – recording • Joaquim Monte – drum recording • Bernardo Centeno – assistant drum recording • Marta Salogni – mixing • Heba Kadry – mastering Artwork and design • Avey Tare – collages • Rob Carmichael (SEEN) – design ==Charts==