What's now rising on both sides of the Atlantic in the shape of Factory Floor, Wild Beasts, the XX, Frank Ocean, Flying Lotus and a resurgent hip-hop scene is an embracing of life in all its complicated, messy and very now glory a life free of television style narratives and the compulsive need to look over your shoulder and make sure everyone's watching as you sip your chai while scrawling in a Moleskine. The Mumfords and their tweed are still floating around, but any signs of Britpop oi Britannia, street urchin skiffle or Yorke junior wailers are buried beneath the mounds of never worn plimsolls piled high outside the back of your local Topshop. In the UK, the obsession with US Pitchfork culture and the exported image of "I'm 'avin it" guitar lads is passing. And let's not even get started on the tortured chipmunk squeaks of Passion Pit. The once mighty Animal Collective's digital hippie shapes collapsed in a squiggly, techno tie-dyed heap on this year's Centipde Hz.
Even Grizzly Bear's more like-minded Stateside peers are increasingly to be found floundering. Stateside, the crest of chill-bros and lo-fi brats has finally smashed against the rocks, with the former left flapping around inside their navels for a fresh YouTube rip, while the latter have almost all proven themselves to be nothing more than junior auxiliary members of the Blink 182 brigade, content spitting out "gnarly" pop-punk riffs outside their local Taco Bell while slurping Mountain Dew in the hot suburban sun. The Grizzlies return at a peculiar time for the US and UK indie world that's long supported them - as Quietus co-pilot Luke Turner recently outlined in this piece. It has been three years since the release of the US top 10 charting Veckatimest and they're now officially back with the release of Shields. It's not the name of Grizzly Bear's new album, but after producing three albums of ecclesiastical (in tone, if not belief) psyche pop, it wouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone if the band had emerged from their Brooklyn dens with a ludicrously twee name like Enter the Cherubim attached to their latest. This one feels a bit more rough and exposed, so that on Shields, everything speaks for itself.Enter the Cherubim. ''Veckatimest was a little more of a polite album the desire to keep the vocals smooth might have kept a little distance between us and the audience. ''This has a different energy behind it,'' concludes Ed Droste. The potential energy gathered in tour vans and busses, in studios and on stages for years was finally released, giving the individual band's pieces the chance to recover and, after a year, return to being Grizzly Bear, and delivering their best album yet.
Between those records, though, they'd not only toured (headlining as well as with the likes of Radiohead, Feist, Wilco, TV on the Radio and more), but issued singles and splits, EPs, remixes and solo projects.
The quartet of Chris Bear, Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor have never made a quick follow-up it took them three years to get from Horn of Plenty to Yellow House, three more to get from Yellow House to Veckatimest. Shields, the fourth and most fluid album by Grizzly Bear to date, will be released on Sept.