Animal Collective Share Mesmerizing yet Unnerving Video For "Golden Gal"

Psychedelic pop mainstays Animal Collective have shared a new single from their upcoming album Painting With, coming in the form of a music video directed by Australian director Celeste Potter. "Golden Gal" marks the third single from the LP, which is set to be their eleventh in total and their first since 2012's Centipede Hz.

Throughout their career, the band has regularly explored the overlap between the ecstatically pleasurable and the disturbing in childhood memory, and "Golden Gal" finds them returning to this familiar ground. While the track is texturally and melodically upbeat, Potter compliments it with something like the demented version of an animated kids show, suggesting that things are more complex than its happy-seeming surface would suggest. Centered around a visual of a zombified, jumprope-wielding young girl, the rest of the screen fills up with unnervingly hallucinatory imagery, reminding us that there's often something distinctly unnerving behind AC's hypnotic, sugar-sweet songwriting.

Check out the video above, revisit the psychotropical video for "Floridada," and be sure to pick up Painting With when it's out this Friday, February 19.

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