Croz Boyce is the newest offshoot of the indie rock institution Animal Collective, featuring Avey Tare (Dave Portner) on guitar and Geologist (Brian Weitz) on electronics, as well as David “Croz” Crosby in spirit. When I think of David Crosby, I think of the hushed reverence of his signature song “Guinnevere”, his ragged intensity on Neil Young’s “Ohio”, and, less flatteringly, his reputedly abrasive character. None of those associations quite prepares you for the self-titled album Croz Boyce.
The clearest difference is the absence of a voice. Crosby’s music, whether solo or with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, is inseparable from the vocal blend; multiple lines resolving into something warm and unified. Croz Boyce, by contrast, is entirely instrumental. In place of harmony, there is interplay. Portner’s acoustic guitar is dry and intimate, set against Weitz’s drifting, often unstable electronics. The two recorded separately, Portner in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Weitz in Washington, DC, passing fragments back and forth. You can hear that distance. The music rarely settles. It feels assembled across space rather than performed within it.
Track titles like “Hanging Out With a Blueberry Pop” and “Banana Pudding” recall Animal Collective’s 2007 confection Strawberry Jam, a “desert record” that revelled in contradiction, synthetic yet sticky, sharp-edged yet sweet. That record always sounded urban to me, its layers piling up like the overlapping traffic of a big city, with guitars and electronics blurring into a kind of organised din, and the smoggy, insistent vocals cutting through.
Croz Boyce feels like a deliberate clearing of that space. The density is gone. What remains is air and a certain dryness. In “What If Janis Just Stared”, the guitar tuning immediately suggests desert blues, with the cyclical phrasing and open intervals recalling music from the Sahel more than anything in Animal Collective’s past. Across the album, Portner’s tone stays brittle and exposed, as if each note were left out in the sun a little too long.
The record doesn’t stay in the desert. The electronics complicate any stable sense of place. “Hanging Out With a Blueberry Pop” shimmers in a way that briefly suggests something more pastoral, almost reminiscent of the soft-focus glow you might associate with the Beach Boys or Donovan. “Towson Acid”, meanwhile, drifts into a different register entirely, its keyboard lines uncannily close to John Lennon‘s “Across the Universe”, not just melodically, but in the way they seem to hover, slightly detached from the ground beneath them.
Elsewhere, the guitar pulls things back toward something heavier and more earthbound. “Steven’s Sunshine Rejected”, with its drop-D tuning, bears the character of an acoustic Nirvana song like “Something in the Way”, less about melody than about resonance, the low strings giving the instrument a kind of physical weight. If the desert tracks feel parched, this feels closer to a Pacific Northwest forest, being denser, darker, and more enclosed.
What emerges over the course of Croz Boyce is less a coherent landscape than a series of overlapping ones, desert, pastoral, forest, none of them fully settling. That restlessness is often compelling. When the duo let patterns repeat and slowly mutate, the music takes on a hypnotic quality, but there are moments where that same instinct tips into inertia. “Eternal Dream Drone”, built around a figure that circles a single chord, gestures toward something profound but instead infuriates with its lack of resolution.
When the final track “Banana Pudding” arrives, the balance finally breaks. The acoustic guitar is interrupted by sudden electronic bursts, as if the recording itself were being interfered with—less a climax than a disruption. It’s a striking ending, though not an entirely satisfying one.
If earlier Animal Collective records translated density into exhilaration, Croz Boyce work in the opposite direction, pulling things apart and seeing what remains. What’s left is fragmentary, geographically unstable, and often beautiful—music that seems to search for a place to land, without ever quite deciding where that might be.