Sleep Cycle

Deakin (Joshua Dibb) has always been the most elusive member of Animal Collective. While he co-founded the band, he frequently takes extended breaks from group activity, and he's only appeared on roughly half of their albums, with the group's 2009 breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion not being one of them. His debut solo release, Sleep Cycle, took a considerably long time to reach fruition, as he initially began crowdfunding the release in 2009. Ultimately, he ended up donating all of the proceeds to a charity benefiting enslaved Tuareg people in Mali, and the album ended up being self-funded. The result is a long-labored, intensely personal album that ends up coming far closer to earlier iterations of AC than their later, poppier, more crowd-friendly material. This isn't to say that it's a complete return to the sprawling, improvised freak-folk sound of Campfire Songs or Hollinndagain, but it doesn't resemble the sugar rush of albums like Painting With (which Deakin did not contrib