Animal Collective: FloriDada

They’re back! Animal Collective’s new animated track “FloriDada” strips away the drone passages and layers of reverbs and aims for something more up-close—almost a cappella like, with some accompaniment from squelchy synths. “Everything seems drenched in reverb these days, and is so distant,” David “Avey Tare” Portner tells Rolling Stone. “In a way, it was a reaction to that.” Painting With, which marks Animal Collective’s …

Premiere: “Stranger” by VOWWS

The music video for the darkly sweet, industrial song strings together ghosts of memories

With their journey beginning in Sydney, Matt and Rizz of the Australian/Iranian duo VOWWS are now settled in LA and casting sublime, carefree West Coast temperaments into their shadowy, distortion-filled pop songs. Through bold spunk, they wrote a song specifically for Gary Numan, “Losing Myself In You,” and got the pioneering “industrial” artist to sing on it—simply by asking someone who knew someone who knew …

Robin Pecknold: Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind (The Five Keys Cover)

Out of the blue, Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes releases a fun cover of the 1956 single “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” by the R&B singing group The Five Keys, with the message “happy holidays.” His rendition starts out sweet and nostalgic, before blooming into a dissonant frenzy of banged chords and noise. It feels like a much more realistic interpretation of the …