Sit back and allow me to explain to you why Feels is the best Animal Collective album while I am still drunk.

That's not to say SJ isn't a good album. It is still among my favorite albums by any band in terms of lyrics and themes. SJ came out right when I was starting college and was at pretty much the absolute pinnacle of my Animal Collective fandom - and the themes of the difficulty of growing up and finding happiness in the adult world still resonate with me today.

That being said, as much as I love SJ, it has never even been a close race between SJ and Feels in terms of the best Animal Collective album. Feels is just perfect, it towers over SJ as a monolith that is completely untouchable.

SJ was the birth of the "new" Animal Collective, the Animal Collective that would go on to make MPP and play Pitchfork Fest and make late night TV appearances. That Animal Collective is well and good - for the majority of fans that are still around, that may be the only Animal Collective you know.

But where SJ is the birth of the new Animal Collective, it also is the death of the old Animal Collective - but before the death of the old Animal Collective, they pulled everything together and gave us their magnum opus, a culmination of everything they had learned over their years of being struggling musicians or working day jobs, playing in smoky bars to crowds of none, traveling in a shitty van and playing with broken equipment. After a difficult time making HCTI, Geo and Deakin left music to do other things for a while, and then Sung Tongs happened - the band's popularity and fame grew ever so slightly. And there were a few more people in those crowds...

To understand what Feels is requires an understanding of what Animal Collective was. Animal Collective was a group of four high school friends that were exposed to an eclectic background of noise, psychedelia, and alternative rock. They played noise, like a lot of people did in the New York noise scene. Their music was chaos, but underneath the chaos was sort of a hint of the familiar, something beautiful even.

And then Sung Tongs happened and the songs got tighter, they got relatable. And it was mostly just an album of 2 acoustic guitars, but it sounded unlike anything else.

Animal Collective live during this era, in between ST and before SJ was released, was an absolute force of nature. There was nothing elaborate on stage - it was just some guys, a keyboard here or there, a guy with a guitar, some drums, it didn't look out of the ordinary. But the songs sounded like they were essentially held together with duct tape and string, but the songs gripped you like almost nothing else ever has. At its heart it was a guy just playing a guitar and screaming at the top of his lungs, but those songs seemed to exist only in that moment, some dive bar or 500-seater auditorium. The songs twisted and turned and there were weird effects and holy shit was there a train whistle solo in the middle of that song?

And that's where Animal Collective songs used to come from, it came from blood sweat and tears of touring and working those songs down until they were perfect. But at the same time, their songs were the product of young adults that were on a grueling tour, they played in grime, they existed in grime. The songs were messy but there was a beauty in that chaos, it all just came together.

And so when it came time to record Feels, there was actually a brief time period when the band thought that they were going to break up because of Panda's move to Portugal. But these Feels songs, it was evident for anyone who heard them, were something special.

And so maybe it would be a last hurrah, a celebration of FINALLY getting to live their dream of playing music together as friends. They busted their ass putting everything they could into Feels, finally, after years and years of growing as musicians, honing songs on the road, channeling noise into melody, hundreds of hours in the studio and countless tweaks and an unfathomable amount of adding and tweaking those songs, Feels was born. And somehow, those songs still sound like they're from the same chaotic smoky bars as they were written despite being cleaned up and with more studio effects added. The songs that, though it's hard to explain, make you feel the same weight as the person that wrote them. Feels was like the culmination of all those hours screaming for no crowds, the hundreds of hours of taping their music at their practice space in New York, songs becoming both recognizable as coming from "regular" instruments but that also could have come from no one else. Songs that seemed both deeply personal but also easily attachable to anyone that heard them.

And then Feels was done it was as if the band was saying "we gave it everything we had." It's like those hours of playing absolute chaos in bars had somehow transcended into something else - that the songs had for a brief moment transcended their entire existence. The entire album, top-to-bottom, perfect.

And after Feels, the songs that would become SJ started to be written in the same way as the Feels songs. They came from that same grimy, dirty dive bar, coming from sweating and trial and error. But then once the album came out, the songs reminded people that they were Animal Collective on a major label. They were more accessible, sure, but they were also polished to the point of losing their identity. They're great songs, but despite being darker than Feels they seem almost saccharine, soulless sometimes, like they had been polished down to only their vague essence and not the heart of what they once were.

And that was the death of old Animal Collective. If you watch, say, the Starlight Ballroom show from 2006, and compare it to the Starlight Ballroom show in 2007, you can start to see the writing on the wall. Both are all time great Animal Collective shows, but in 2007 the organized chaos is replaced with, high energy though it may be, a lot of time just sitting there where a synth loop played for 1+ minute, the influence of those Panda-written songs that are just unchanging loops the whole time.

It's always been sort of funny to me that a lot of people that saw Animal Collective during the MPP+ era (particularly the beginning of what would become the ChZ era) later told me they were disappointed because, to paraphrase, the live performances just didn't live up to what MPP was on the album. When SJ came out, it was completely the opposite. The live performances were amazing and the songs on the album, in comparison, felt a little flat.

Avey has said that SJ is his least favorite Animal Collective album, and also that it was the first time that there were members of the group who weren't totally on board with what they were doing. The band has also said that SJ's mixing was not to their liking. I always just kind of wondered if Avey sort of recognized it's cleanness and almost pop-like nature of being just... different from what Animal Collective was - different from what those songs even were when they were playing them live.

There are plenty of people that love MPP and I'm sure love SJ as well. But if you watch a performance from the MPP era where it is essentially 3 guys sitting at keyboards/synths and not moving almost the entire concert, it seems light years away from the Animal Collective of starlight ballroom. Geo even joked about it, that it was so weird to finish playing an entire show and not even sweating anymore.

One might say that caused an overcorrection of course where ChZ was too active and too chaotic, but SJ always felt like it was Feels minus some ingredients, rather than progressing forward. There is no progressing forward from Feels - it is and always will be the pinnacle of the band giving it everything they had.

I've been an Animal Collective fan a long time, and among more serious Animal Collective fans rather than the general public, I've always always always seen Feels win best album. When SJ came out, music critics basically said that it was going to win them a lot of new fans because of how accessible ti is compared to everything else the band had done up to that point - but I can't help but feel that the band lost something too.

That's not to say that "new" Animal Collective is worse than "old" Animal Collective, as change is change and moving in a new direction is part of being a musician for as long as they have. Just for me personally, Feels was like throwing everything they had in the tank into one perfect statement - it was the perfect culmination of everything they had been and the absolute pinnacle of what they could be. They have deserved all the accolades and fame they have gotten in the years since Feels, but they've never even come close to making an album that good again.