“Don’t you feel me, feel your heart shine?
Unity of all kind, unity of all kind.”

Throughout their career, Animal Collective have reinvented themselves seemingly on a whim. They’ve built up an incredibly diverse catalog as they changed skins time and again. While working on their previous album Painting With, the band considered changing their name to The Painters, in much the same way that Arcade Fire had considered morphing into The Reflektors prior to the release of their Reflektor album. Instead, both bands stuck with the tried and true brand name. The Painters is a companion EP to the full-blown album, a selection of songs recorded at the same time and that fit right into the same bubbly-synth aesthetic. It’s short and fun but insubstantial when compared to their best efforts.

The highlight is opener ‘Kinda Bonkers’—a joyful and poppy number that resembles ‘FloriDada’ though its pace is less breakneck, and it resolves into a repeated mantra towards its conclusion. They repeat the trick of Avey Tare and Panda Bear trading off snatches of vocal melody on ‘Peacemaker’, while ‘Goalkeeper’ is a thumping song with the vocals obscured beyond decipherability. It’s an inessential blip in the AnCo canon (there’s a reason the songs didn’t make the album), but it’s in the same vein as Painting With—an enjoyable if unremarkable collection of songs.

Favorite Tracks: Kinda Bonkers.