Panda Bear & Sonic Boom

An intoxicating tribute to '60s pop

Six years ago, Sonic Boom traded his home in England for Portugal, in part to be closer to Panda Bear. The unlikely duo met almost a decade earlier through MySpace, the start of a musical alliance between the two. As such, Sonic Boom mixed and co-produced a series of Panda Bear releases on 2011's Tomboy and worked closely together on 2015's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper.

Sonic Boom's idea for Reset, (2022) was simple: After dragging his records to Portugal, he put them on a turntable and renewed his fascination with old favorites. There was the amazing early rock singer Eddie Cochran, for example, or the stunning American harmonizers of The Everly Brothers. There was also something new that struck him - the way the graceful intros of these standards felt like stage curtains. Sonic Boom began making loops out of these prefaces, twisting, bending the parts like scrap metal. Panda Bear, in turn, added vocals and playing.

The core of Reset formed not long after the international lockdowns began. The chance to work on these songs together offered a resource amid isolation.

Reset is 40 minutes of strange light emerging from a particularly dark time. That is perhaps the album's most important promise: to deal with the not infrequent hardships of reality and offer a path to another side. If making Reset was temporary medicine for Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, it is now permanent for the rest of us, a reminder that sometimes singing along to old favorites with friends can be enough to make the world feel a little better.

"Reset is refined, concentrated, a focused burst of reggae-esque exultation." - Pitchfork

For fans of MGMT, Tame Impala, Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Dan Deacon, Dirty Projectors

An organization of Ha Concerts and Democrazy
photo © Ian Witchell