More than any of their contemporaries, it would be perverse to think of Animal Collective, from Baltimore, as a band who rest on their laurels. Nonetheless, as long as four years ago one poster on a fan site professed to have had enough. “OK, we get it,” he hissed in the wake of Sung Tongs in 2004, “You got stoned in the woods once.” Even then, it was a reductive way of looking at a band about whom it’s hard to get reductive. Talking about the four-piece in general terms is a task akin to herding cats. There can be as many as four of them, or — as on Young Prayer in 2003, a solo acoustic memorial to Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox’s dying father — as few as one.

Ascribing a signature sound to the band, who formed eight years ago, is hardly more productive. Trace elements of the squally interference that characterised A Manatee Dance (2001) remain. But yes, our heckler from the back may have zoned in on the one thing that unites every record made under the Animal Collective gazebo. It may not be the direct result of getting stoned in the woods but it’s hard to think of another band you can turn to for that feeling of glugging the unconcentrated squash of life.

And on Merriweather Post Pavilion, it’s like that, only more so. Lyrical clues suggest that, far from being the enemy of creativity, the proverbial pram in the hallway has cut sleep in half and made the world a colour-bleedingly lysergic place. On Also Frightened children are a key detail in a somnambulent monologue in which each line sucks you in like a separate harmonic whirlpool. It’s already heartbreaking, but when the refrain “Are you also frightened?” begins, it’s a proper pull-to-the-side-of-the-road-and-weep moment. On My Girls, twinkling keyboards recalling the Source’s 1991 You Got the Love trigger a vertiginous slide into bliss-out pop, barely obscuring Lennox’s meditation on the parental urge to provide.

It’s not the sexiest subject matter, but — aside from the near-subsonic bass that pulses through the whole record — these songs don’t feel as if they belong in the physical realm. Not the synaesthetic slow march of Taste and certainly not Bluish. Despite the unchanging electronic oscillation that underscores the latter, it might be Animal Collective’s most straight-up pop moment — a sensuous, breathy chorus that locates unlikely common ground between ethereal early 1980s art-poppers Eyeless in Gaza and Love’s Theme by the Love Unlimited Orchestra.

Only in the final minutes of the closing song, Brothersport, does the pace relent. Once the music stops, all that remains is a sound like car horns in a tunnel, as though the volume of traffic in the group’s creative rush hour has finally caused gridlock. If they fleetingly sound pleased with themselves, who could blame them? Other bands have drawn out entire careers on a quarter of the ideas that Animal Collective have packed into one album.

(Domino, TS £11.74)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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