Trivia / Animal Collective

• Creator Backlash: While they appear to like the record itself just fine, the band mentioned that they disliked the title Here Comes the Indian for their fourth album, as they felt that it objectified indigenous people in a demeaning way. This is why the album was renamed Ark (the album's original Working Title) in 2020.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Panda's self-titled debut solo album, which was technically the first piece of Animal Collective related music ever released, is extremely hard to find now. While he's not ashamed of it as a whole, he mentioned in an interview that since his style had changed completely since he first recorded it he feels that he's no longer the same person who made the album, and the only reason why anyone would want a reissue would be historical curiosity.
  • Before graduating high school and moving to New York from Baltimore, Avey Tare and Geologist recorded an EP together called Paddington Band under the name Automine. The sound was completely different from anything they made since: it was mostly guitar-based, sounding closer to Pavement (which makes sense since Avey said that they started out as a Pavement cover band) or slowcore. Until it was uploaded to YouTube, nobody knew it existed, and physical copies are still so rare that Discogs says that only two users on the site own a copy.
  • Averted with their early albums: while it was hard to track down official copies for decades (Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished had an extremely limited press run in its initial release, and even after it was reissued in 2003 alongside Danse Macabre it went out of print), you can now listen to them for free on their Bandcamp. Spirit They're Gone, meanwhile, received a remaster in 2023.
• Playing Against Type: Panda Bear is featured on Daft Punk's "Doin' It Right", which nowhere near as weird as much as the music with Animal Collective is.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Avey Tare and Geologist made loops of Avey improvising on a friend's piano, then used those loops as a basis for the songs on Feels - the piano in question hadn't been tuned in years, so the band ended up tuning their instruments to the out-of-tune loops, even having a professional piano tuner detune a piano in the studio to match the original out-of-tune piano recordings.
• What Could Have Been: At some point early in their careers, Panda Bear reached out to Daft Punk to request that they remix an Animal Collective song, but they declined due to having given up remixing a while back. Their correspondence did lead to Panda Bear being featured on "Doin' It Right" though.
  • Rockstar Games commissioned them to write a song for the soundtrack for Red Dead Redemption, but the resulting track (called "Mountain Game") was seen as not fitting in with the Wild West aesthetic and was rejected. It was eventually released on their YouTube channel in 2016
  • Spirit They're Gone was supposed to have just been an Avey Tare solo album, but Avey thought that Panda Bear's drumming was such a key part of the album's sound that it would be unfair to not give him equal billing.
  • "Animal Records", the self-published micro-label that gave the band their name, was originally named "Soccer Star Records". In another universe, they'd probably be called "Soccer Star Collective"!
  • Avey said in a blogpost that when the band members first played together in high school, they had considered naming their band "Wendy Darling" as a reference to The Shining.