Croz Boyce, “Croz Boyce” (Domino, 2026)
The origin of this new project from the Animal Collective gang dates all the way back to the band’s appearance on 2022’s massive For The Birds: The Birdsong Project compilation. While Animal Collective was collectively credited for their “Brown Thrasher” contribution, the piece was actually performed by the duo of Dave Portner (Avey Tare) and Brian Weitz (Geologist) “working through their mutual adoration for a springtime idyll.”
Afterwards, the two decided to keep their collaboration going while the rest of Animal Collective were busy with other activities, so Portner and Weitz started bouncing recordings back and forth between their North Carolina and Washington DC homes in 2023 like an extended interstate game of exquisite corpse. For the most part, all of these pieces began with loose and relaxed acoustic guitar themes composed by Portner, but those themes expanded in unpredictable, playful, and free-form ways that feel like a chilled out California hippy commune jam colored and warped by surreal, psych-damaged synth intrusions.
This project’s unusual name is something of an absurdist homage to David Crosby, as his 2023 passing loosely corresponded to the birth of Portner and Weitz’s fresh intra-band partnership. Crosby does seem like an appropriate muse for the Croz Boys in at least a few senses, as there are definitely acoustic guitars and laid-back folk-rock vibes at the heart of this album, but that heart starts sprouting considerably weirder and more abstract tendrils almost immediately.
In fact, the opening track and lead single “Hanging Out With a Blueberry Pop” is easily one of the album’s most shapeshifting and disorienting pieces, as lush guitar strums launch a meandering, tangled, and gently psychedelic journey that unpredictably drifts between free-form improv and evanescent passages of rippling beauty. The following “Towson Acid” is similarly loose, sun-dappled, and fragmented, but the second half begins to delve into a deeper psychedelic terrain beyond mere stoned summer day vibes, as the synths get a bit more trippy and whooshing. The final moments still sound like a loose-limbed hippy jam with hand drums, but the synths are convulsive and chaotic in jarringly party crashing and avant-garde ways.
While the album is best experienced as a steadily deepening immersion in which amiable acoustic guitar strums splinter into a host of kaleidoscopic and spaced out new shapes, there is also an arc of tightening focus the album progresses: the more obtuse early pieces definitely feel more wandering, improvisatory, and elusive than the later pieces. I would still describe damn near everything on this entire album as very vibe-driven, mind you, yet a piece like the lovely “Abundant River Zap” feels like a single sustained vibe rather than shapeshifting and lysergic fantasia of dream-logic, as the warm and rhythmic chord swells give it a sublime and hypnotically pulsing cohesion.
For me, the strongest piece on the album is “Eternal Dream Drone,” as a slowly pulsing synth throb is doubled by warm, rich acoustic guitar strums for eight mesmerizing minutes of pure heaven while smudgy radiant psychedelia flickers in the periphery like a living rainbow. There’s also a pretty cool noise squall crescendo, which is a welcome feature that is also loosely shared by the tragically brief closer “Banana Pudding,” as jazzy guitar strums gradually dissolve, smear, and pitch-shift beneath a spaced-out “fireworks display” finale of sputtering and squirming synths.
Those final two pieces are where the album really hits the mark for me, but Croz Boyce is an intriguing and casually experimental detour from expected Animal Collective terrain in general, as it rarely feels like Weitz had any interest in fleshing our Portner’s guitar parts into conventionally song-like and melodic territory. Instead, it seems like he had an enthusiastic desire to veer the proceedings off the rails as quickly as possible to find out where they could end up. Hell, there is even a pretty good chance that Portner and Weitz were deliberately fucking with each other or trying to amuse themselves with deliberately jarring or wrong-footing curveballs.
I can certainly understand that mindset, as this project is essentially a celebration of Portner and Weitz’s friendship and they wanted to make it into something more unique and fresh than an Animal Collective album with only half the band present. Also, Animal Collective still exists, so it would not make sense for either artist to pour their best song ideas and strongest hooks into a side project (especially since Portner is generally regarded to be the collective’s principal songwriter). An unpredictable free-form playground, however, makes perfect sense.
That approach admittedly may not an ideal recipe for a great album, yet Croz Boyce is not a half-baked improv misfire either, as Portner and Weitz use this opportunity to stretch out and luxuriate in simple pleasures like a single slowly strummed guitar chord or the way that shifting synth tones can subtly transform the feel of a melody. While its looseness and eccentricity can definitely be challenging at times, the summery and drifting ambiance of Croz Boyce definitely has some genuine flashes of inspiration and ephemeral beauty that reveal themselves more vividly with every listen.
Listen here.
