Merriweather Post Pavilion

There is a moment early in this album where the sound seems to breathe. Not the music exactly, but the sound itself, the reverb and texture and layered electronics that Animal Collective built at Sweet Tea Studio in Oxford, Mississippi in early 2008. It expands. It surrounds you. And then it pulls you under in the best possible way.

The album is named after an outdoor concert venue in Maryland where two of the members went to shows as kids. That nostalgia is baked into every second of it, but it is not a sad record. It is a record about wanting ordinary things desperately and finding that desire almost unbearably beautiful. A safe home. A family. A summer night that does not end.

"My Girls" is built on nothing more than the longing for four walls and a roof over the people you love, and it sounds like a revelation. "Summertime Clothes" captures the particular restlessness of being young and alive on a hot night and not knowing what to do with any of it. "Brother Sport" closes the album like a door being thrown open.

The production is unlike almost anything that came before it. Synthesizers and samplers and voices layered so deep they become their own atmosphere. Pitchfork named it the most critically acclaimed album of 2009 and a generation of musicians spent the next decade trying to figure out how it was made.

You do not need to know any of that. You just need to press play and let it happen to you.