Panda Bear has announced a live album, pb band live 25 at power station, out December 11 through Domino Documents. The 17 tracks were recorded at New York's Power Station as the touring cycle behind 2025's Sinister Grift came to an end, with a full band behind Noah Lennox for the first time in his solo career. A new arrangement of "Take Pills" leads the release.
The lineup matters here. Tim Koh plays bass, Rivka Ravede handles sampler, Maria Reis is on keyboards and percussion, Tomé Silva plays drums, and all four sing. That is a working band, not a pickup group assembled for a session, and the record exists because Sinister Grift pushed Lennox toward voices beyond his own. Songs built around a single figure at a microphone had to be rebuilt for five people on a stage.
The setting sharpens the point. Power Station is a room with a reputation made by other people's records, and taking a touring band into it, straight off the road, suggests the performances were still warm when they were cut. "Take Pills," from 2007's Person Pitch, is a sampler-built piece, so hearing Ravede and Reis carry it as a band arrangement is the first clue to how far these versions travel from the originals.
Lennox has been moving between configurations for years, from the duo record with Sonic Boom that ROMBO covered earlier this year to Animal Collective's recent return to Feels. A live document of his own band sits between those poles: the solo catalogue, played by an ensemble, in a studio. More on the artist in ROMBO's Panda Bear coverage.
What to listen for is the backing vocals. Four additional voices change the register of songs written as solitary loops, and the question is whether the harmony thickens the material or opens it up. Seventeen tracks is a substantial survey of a catalogue that has rarely been performed this way. The Bandcamp player below carries the first taste.
