Painting With

Pitchfork 6.2/10 Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of Animal Collective's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. It feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

A.V. Club C Animal Collective’s music has always boasted a certain amount of impenetrability. Even the albums that lean more heavily on folk music tropes come with a set of barriers that keep the listener at an arm’s length. That’s not to say that the band’s music can’t be moving—Merriweather Post Pavillion exudes great joy…

The Line of Best Fit 7/10 In a world where you can see the colour of gravitational waves, an album like Painting With is not out of place – it’s a work of great weight and a masterpiece of colour.

Rolling Stone 3.5/5 Check out our album review of Artist's Painting With on Rolling Stone.com.

DIY 4/5 An album about doing away with boundaries, escaping definition, and running riot.

The Skinny 4/5 Baltimore's foremost avant-garde popsters return with their focus renewed; Painting With is duly their best effort since 2009's Merriweather Post-Pavilion.

Under The Radar 3.0/10 Animal Collective's career is a strange one. There was a time in the very recent past that a new album would have sent a section of the Internet—and I dare say it's a section that would have crossed over heavily with Under the Radar's readership—into

Clash 6/10 It can be argued that Animal Collective have one of the most steadfast and divisive discographies around. Since their inception in 1999 and bar maybe one

The Observer 3/5 Although they’ve gone ‘accessible’, the veteran psychedelic experimentalists are still pretty weird

Slant 4/5 For both its earnest, uninhibited sense of play and impeccable pop, Animal Collective's 'Painting With' is a uniquely affecting album.

Pop Matters 6/10 Photo: Tom.

The Guardian 3/5 Baltimore’s most admired and reviled band deliver a new album that is undoubtedly inventive, and at times weirdly satisfying – but almost supernaturally annoying as well