Animal Collective Will Finally Play ‘Feels’ Live Again

For years, Animal Collective fans have apparently been asking the same question: if the band was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Feels, why not actually play the thing? Now they have an answer. Animal Collective will reunite for the first time in four years this October to perform the seminal 2005 album in full at two shows on Oct. 22 at Queens’ Knockdown Center and Oct. 24 at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.

Tickets for the concerts, dubbed FEELS LIVE, go on sale Thursday (Sept. 10). The timing follows last year’s 20th anniversary of Feels, which was marked by a limited-edition reissue featuring a bonus disc of nine B-sides and previously unreleased demos via Domino. Apparently, the celebration left something unfinished.

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“When we celebrated the Feels 20th Anniversary edition last year, people often asked, why aren’t you performing it live? It was a good question, and honestly, one we just hadn’t asked ourselves,” the band says. “We were so used to our schedules not lining up that we didn’t consider it. But yeah, why didn’t we? The celebration felt incomplete to you all, and to us too.”

That realization sent the band back into the machinery of an album they hadn’t performed together in years.“We can relearn this album, we said. We can find old loops, tunings, pedals and a working minidisc player to grab old sounds. Then maybe if a small window of time opens ip … Now it has, and we’re going to play the album in full (as well as some extras from the time) in NYC and LA this October.”

“A 21st birthday party,” they continue. “We know only playing two shows in the two biggest cities in the states leaves a lot of you without an option to come out. We sincerely wish everyone who wants to see these shows could do so, and we’re sorry we can’t make that happen for you. As we said above, we only have a short window to get together right now. We’ll see how it goes and how the future shapes up down the road.”

Feels occupies a particularly pivotal spot in Animal Collective’s early-2000s evolution. Released in 2005 after the breakthrough Sung Tongs, it found Josh “Deakin” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz back in the quartet alongside Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox. Recorded in Seattle with engineer Scott Colburn, the album captured the group pushing its experimental instincts toward something more immediate, melodic and emotionally expansive.

It also arrived just before the band’s extraordinary ascent accelerated with 2007’s Strawberry Jam and 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, records that would take Animal Collective’s strange, ecstatic sound far beyond the confines of the experimental underground. When SPIN spoke with Weitz in 2016 about revisiting the Feels era, he reflected on the peculiar elasticity of time and how dramatically those early years could seem in retrospect.

“The rate of change as you get older slows and the perception of time passing becomes very relative,” he said. “When I think back to my early twenties, it’s very much like, ‘This girlfriend and then this girlfriend, then this house and this apartment.’ Everything lasted for a year, or like nine months, and those experiences were so radically different that two or three years could feel like, ‘Jeez, I’m not even the same person.’ But now it’s like a decade passed and I’m like, ‘I still come home to the same household.’”

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