Animal Collective: The Scientists

Animal Collective's sound has always played like something drawn from the ages-old tradition of gnostic rituals, with euphoric hooks jabbing into noisy spells -- most notably on their crypto-folk album Sung Tongs, the frayed rock meditation Feels, and the cubist electronic-pop thingamajig Strawberry Jam. And it proves all the more prevalent now, as Animal Collective move toward increasingly aspirational, accessible songs.

For all the ambition that seems to imply, Animal Collective are too mild-mannered to drift anywhere near grandiloquence. "What we're going for is supposed to be more fun," says Lennox, sipping miso soup at Tokyo Bar, "like a celebration, rather than just making noise." None of the group does drugs in ways that might seem logical for a band so notoriously trippy. ("I'm not really a psychedelic warrior, if you know what I mean," Lennox says.) And for an outfit that puts on thundering stage shows adorned with glow-in-the-dark skeletons in tutus and hallucinogenic strobes, none of them appears any more interested in attention now than they were when first concealed behind masks.

Instead, Animal Collective come off as old friends who started making music as a searching enterprise and continue to for the same reasons, now with lots of other bands listening in for cues (MGMT, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer, Gang Gang Dance, and the Dodos are among those in debt). It's not always easy: Portner remains in New York, but Weitz moved to Washington, D.C., and Lennox to Lisbon, Portugal, where he lives with his wife and three-year-old daughter. And their impulses don't always turn to conventional channels. Their next project, planned for release on theater screens or DVD later this year, is a "visual record," with short filmic vignettes and all new music conceived to interact with the images. "We see it as the next Animal Collective record," Weitz says, "but we don't know if it will be received like that, because a lot of it is pretty weird and abstract."

As the sound in Tokyo Bar turns to a mishmash of hip-hop and chatter, Weitz, drinking a Japanese grain alcohol called shochu, equates Animal Collective's philosophy with his other beloved pursuit, which he learned when he was 12 and which his bandmates have no interest in taking up themselves: scuba diving.

"You're so vulnerable and out of your element," he says. "You look at something as big as your fingernail and think, 'That thing is better suited to survive down here than I am.' To have that stuff be three-dimensional around you totally strips away your ego, as any psychedelic experience does. You just become nothing."