Isn’t It Now?

Pitchfork 8.0/10 On what feels like a companion to Time Skiffs, Animal Collective explore some surprisingly traditional psych-rock modes, but without abandoning their essential trickster spirit.

The Line of Best Fit 8/10 Bursting at the seams with vivid and vibrant inspiration, and immune to filler or idling despite the album’s epic 64-minute duration, Isn’t It Now? neatly thrashes the idea that bands approaching the 25th anniversary of their debut album should politely curdle into creative atrophy and succumb to (at best) cosy nostalgia or, at worst, cod-webbed irrelevance.

DIY 3/5 As their longest album to date, it’s hard to shift any accusations of self-indulgence.

All Music 4/5 It finds them reveling in a state of joyful curiosity, but exploring with a knowing control earned through years of getting to know themselves and their singular sound inside out.

Clash 8/10 Packed with ideas and energy, ‘Isn’t It Now?’ continues the current creative high point within Animal Collective.

The Observer 3/5 After years of remote collaboration and standins, the indie experimentalists are all back in the same room – and overburdened with ideas.

Loud and Quiet 8/10 As on Time Skiffs, sample and electronics manipulator Geologist’s interest in Renaissance music continues to show influence. Here it dictates the three largely acapella harmonies of final track ‘King’s Walk’. Decadent in its polyphony, the closer is a fitting curtain call to this fine chapter in the Baltimore four-piece’s evolving story.

Slant 3/5 Despite a newly chill methodology, the band still lapses into their past idiosyncrasies.

Pop Matters 6/10 Animal Collective’s Isn’t It Now? suggests both urgency and passivity, displaying some of their best attributes but also their self-circumscribed limits.

Spectrum Culture 82% One imagines that Animal Collective’s creative process is, while fruitful, one that requires a bit of patience.

Beats Per Minute 83% Like following the development of a Miyazaki, there’s a sense of wonder to a fantastical realm, which harmonises in a dreamlike logic. Emotional archeology, for beginners and experts alike, it resides among the group’s five best efforts.