Those and other trademark Grizzly Bear elements - like sweet-but-melancholic harmonies and melodies that weave like a wandering brushstroke - are in full effect, but they’re surrounded by slick, urbane textures, an atmospheric sheen. Their pastoral roots are still there, in the cascading guitars of “Three Rings” or “Neighbors” or the cooing “Systole” (Chris Taylor’s first time delivering a lead vocal for the band). The answer Painted Ruins provides is almost contradictory: They sound so little like the other indie survivors releasing music this year that the album blatantly hits you with its Grizzly Bear-ness, but at the same time it marks some sonic and stylistic exploration for the band. The overarching tone feels loaded: Where does Grizzly Bear belong in 2017? What does Grizzly Bear sound like in 2017? “Is anyone listening? Is anyone gonna read this?” Ed Droste asks - seemingly facetiously but maybe not? - at the end of a recent SPIN interview. Rather than positioning them as being at the forefront of the indie world, the articles this time around give the band members space to air their anxieties about how a band like Grizzly Bear couldn’t have started in the current music landscape, and where they might fit into it even at this point in their career. Now, it’s hard to qualify Grizzly Bear’s stature. An artist’s standing can change a lot with a gap like that, even before you account for just how much things have changed in those particular five years, and how rapidly. There was the ubiquity of “Two Weeks” (including a Volkswagen commercial during the Super Bowl) there was Jay-Z and Beyoncé dancing to “Ready, Able” at a Grizzly Bear show seven years before a murderer’s row of indie artists wound up in the credits of Lemonade. Grizzly Bear had “made it” on the strength and exposure of their 2009 release Veckatimest. Last time they released an album, 2012’s Shields, they were the subject of an infamous New York article that branded them “indie-rock royalty” before using them as a test case to observe what making it in the music world - and, really, as an artist in some kind of rock idiom but particularly one born from indie culture - even means in the 21st century. And on Friday, Grizzly Bear will officially add their name to the big ’00s recurrence when they release their fifth full-length album, Painted Ruins.Īt one point, Grizzly Bear were one of the posterboys for this whole thing. The National, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Fleet Foxes, Broken Social Scene, Feist, Spoon, Wolf Parade, and presumably St. It’s been characterized by the return of many of the signature indie acts of the ’00s (particularly the late ’00s), with most of those artists now creeping into middle age and several albums deep into their careers, usually putting their music out with a traditional multi-month lead-in. While 2016 was a year dominated by high-profile albums from visionary pop stars and rappers (Kanye West, Solange, Frank Ocean, Chance The Rapper, Beyoncé, Rihanna) and a few stunning comebacks from established elder statesmen of various generations (Radiohead, Nick Cave, A Tribe Called Quest, David Bowie) - often released with little or no warning - 2017 has occasionally felt like an echo of some other time.
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