Most of the time, Animal Collective flat-out refuses to play songs from their albums at shows. While many bands spend tours acting as promotional mouthpieces, running through the highlights of their latest album, an AC show is a night of entirely new music, often in a new genre, and most likely, from an unexpected lineup of musicians. In this sense, the band is a step ahead of the record industry––something that tends to confuse industry folk, and causes inexperienced audience members to feel like they understand the band even less than they did when the show began.

I took a two-day drive out to watch AC play a tiny bar in Salt Lake City because I wanted to be surprised. No way would I take that drive to watch indie rock band #782 run through the tracks of their latest album, note-for-predictable-note. Going to Animal Collective concerts isn’t about waiting to hear your long-loved feel-good chorus––“Oh, this is my favorite part!” - because you’re not going to hear the old favorites, the ones with the words you know. For this very reason, AC draws a group of fans who don’t just love albums or songs, but the actual musicians along with whatever creative whim those musicians feel like exploring. It’s a “relationship of trust,” and even though the band doesn’t improvise––in fact, they’re pretty adamant about not doing that––their performance ethic stirs up the same fervor as a jazz show or, maybe more appropriately, a Grateful Dead show, a comparison the band endorses. And like deadheads, AC fans follow the band from city to city, and spend hours logging onto the Collected Animals web forum, where they trade bootlegs, videos, setlists, and some deeply considered opinions about the new, live material. (Every so often, members of the band will even drop in to respond to questions or engage in week-long defensive debates about aesthetics with fans).

In SLC, before Animal Collective steps on stage, the guy next to me––bearded, in a hooded sweatshirt, sort of ragged-looking––starts giving me his behind-the-scenes superfan-take on the new material. He points at a group of his friends––all of whom look like they could be stand-ins for the band––and says that they all just came from another show in Colorado and that the band didn’t play any songs off of the then-most-recent album, Feels or the still-months-away album Strawberry Jam (which of course he already had a leaked copy of) and that most of the material sounded, to him, like hip-hop. He’s getting hyper while he explains all this, and just watching him, you can tell that, like all superfans, he feels as if he is a part of the “collective” itself, that the shows make him feel like he’s getting a true concert experience, the way people must have felt before recorded music even existed.