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Set to begin this November, the group’s 6 date UK tour – and then extensive European leg – was announced in the later months of last year. But now all these careful plans have been torn down, in summary, due to “Inflation, currency devaluation, bloated shipping and transportation costs”. The band released a statement to their Instagram explaining the situation: “Friends, we are absolutely gutted to announce today that we are making the decision to cancel our UK/EU dates for this November. We love playing music for you and truly wish we could be there.”

The post then takes a more sombre tone: “It has been a wild year for us trying to push through a mountain of touring obstacles related to COVID and the economy. Three of us got bad cases of Covid. We were forced to cancel shows and lost large amounts of the income that sustains us and our families. But preparing for this tour we were looking at an economic reality that simply does not work and is not sustainable.”

The obvious levels of sheer disappointment then come with the band’s explanation for the newfound costs of touring: “From inflation to currency devaluation, to bloated shipping and transportation costs, and much much more, we simply could not make a budget for this tour that did not lose money even if everything went as well as it could. We have always been the kind of people to persevere through the difficult times and get on stage unless our health prevented it. We are choosing not to take the risk to our mental and physical health with the economic reality of what that tour would have been. We hope you understand and that you know we would not make a choice like this lightly.”

 This summary seems to me like very bad news. Animal Collective may not be a household name these days, but they still have an undying fanbase all around the world after the huge success of their older projects like Merriweather Post Pavilion, or even Strawberry Jam. But now, they don’t have the funds to make it across the Atlantic. Consider for a moment a band in today’s day and age, with a new album that launches their career in the same way as Merriweather did for AN CO. Would we even get the chance to see them? Or will they just end up slipping through the cracks… this is bad news.

The jam was recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Ashville, North Carolina on 12th May 2015. Panda Bear, Avey Tare and Geologist feature on the improvised recording, but Deakin wasn’t present. Drop of Sun is where the band wrote and rehearsed their upcoming album, but with no material being released yet this jam is our first insight as to what we might expect.

The music is accompanied by a suitably trippy underwater video taken at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico. As the band suggested on an Instagram post, “Turn off the lights and watch on as big a screen as possible.” The video was filmed by Collin Foord, a marine biologist and one half of Coral Morphologic. According to a description on vimeo the film was shot over two nights in July 2014, with additional camera and lighting by Deakin and Geologist, and editing being done by Jared Mckay of Coral Morphologic.

You can listen to the jam and watch the other-worldly video below:

Animal Collective’s new album doesn’t have a title yet, and will be their first since 2012’s ‘Centipede Hz’. Since then Panda Bear has released a new solo album called ‘Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper’, and yesterday released a 26-minute mix of unused material on Soundcloud that he recorded during work on ‘Grim Reaper’.