On the aughts indie pop pinnacle Person Pitch, Panda Bear channeled the very familiar sounds of '60s pop into something recognizable yet alien, finding a disorienting way of presenting pure melodic satisfaction.
In 2024, that mantle has been taken up by Cindy Lee, whose opus Diamond Jubilee deconstructs classic pop tropes with jagged-glass guitar tones and rickety, defiantly un-quantized electronics that threaten to tumble apart at any moment.
"Defense," the first single from Panda Bear's upcoming Sinister Grift, is the inevitable coming together of two of modern music's greatest pop decontructionists. Also inevitably, their collaboration doesn't yield anything quite as radical as what they've cooked up separately. Rather, it's a timeless tune — an echoing two-chord figure draped in Panda's warm melodies, sounding less like a freaky reinvention of '60s pop and more like the real thing.