“Defense/Virginia Tech” and Panda Bear

by Clemency Graves, Music & Memory Editor-at-Large

It started, as these things often do, with an unpacked suitcase and a song.

I’m should be packing but I’m musically prepping for a trip to the Basque Country and Portugal. Call it an escape. Call it research. Call it a seasonal migration of the soul. For weeks I’ve been mainlining playlists of old fado ballads and obscure Basque folk songs looking for the resonating frequencies that ache, not because of heartbreak, but because of genetic memory. Songs that transmit what the world forgot.

Then, I receive a link to Panda Bear’s “Defense/Virginia Tech.” I press play.

And there it is again. That voice. Like Brian Wilson singing through the steam valves of a haunted bathhouse. Like the last lullaby sung in a drowning city. Halfway through the track, I remember: Panda Bear lives in Portugal.

Of course he does.

The Serendipity of Sound

There’s something strangely appropriate about stumbling into Panda Bear this way through the side door of geography and longing. I hadn’t thought about Noah Lennox (his government name) in a while. His albums aren’t made for the news cycle. They’re made for time outside of time.

But here, on the edge of a journey, headphones on, boarding pass blinking from my inbox, I’m pulled back into the orbit of an artist who never really left he just operates in a quieter register. A deeper bandwidth.

Who Is Panda Bear?

For the blissfully uninitiated: Panda Bear is Noah Lennox, co-founder of Animal Collective and low-key sonic mystic. Baltimore-born, Lisbon-based, and blessed/cursed with a voice that sounds like a lost soul in a cosmic cathedral filled with etherial interplanetary jellyfish.

Let’s trace the arc:

Young Prayer (2004) – Written after the death of his father, it’s an intimate, wordless reckoning with grief. Acoustic, untitled, unfiltered. Like overhearing someone’s final thoughts through a wall of tears.
Person Pitch (2007) – This is where the legend was born. Sun-warped samples, ecstatic loops, layered harmonies. It was his Pet Sounds meets Endless Summer with a sampler instead of a surfboard. It didn’t just influence a generation—it softened them.
Tomboy (2011) – Stripped down, a little lonelier. The loops get tighter. The palette grayer. But the ache? Eternal.
Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (2015) – Cartoon chaos meets existential funk. Bright colors with blood underneath. Danceable dread.
Buoys (2019) – Minimal, autotuned, underwater. As if the songs were being transmitted from a coral reef collapsing in real time.
Reset (2022) – A collaboration with Sonic Boom. Sampling doo-wop and early pop as if to resuscitate America’s innocence with gentle CPR.
Reset in Dub (2023) – Adrian Sherwood’s dub remix of Reset. It’s like watching the original melt and reform in slow motion.

And now: “Defense/Virginia Tech” – The latest whisper from the depths.

Portugal as Frequency

Lennox didn’t just move to Portugal. He absorbed it.

Portugal is built on saudade, that untranslatable ache for something gone or never fully had. It’s a place where ghost ships outnumber tourists, if you know where to stand. You can hear it in his phrasing. In the spaces between syllables. Fado music, with its grief-soaked vibrato, doesn’t wail, it remembers. Panda Bear doesn’t make fado, exactly. But he makes fado’s electronic cousin.

Loops like lighthouses. Beats like tide patterns. Vocals like postcards from the edge of the world.

Listening to “Defense / Virginia Tech” Ep

The title catches in your throat. Songs stitched together like a redacted memo. Is it a meditation on institutional violence? Or just two ghosts that happened to meet in a dream? Noah’s voice lulls the listener into a fugue state.

“Defense
I’m in deep
I could use you by my side
In some sense
Feel like I’m beat down
Let down by your pride
What’s it become, what its become”

Repetition becomes trance. The voice, his voice, layers and unlayers itself like someone peeling gauze off a wound, gently. You don’t analyze it. You float in it.

“Lookin’ for defense
Nothin’ left to do
But hang my head and cry
What was the intent?
Lookin’ to prove
This move is dignified
If you got an alibi
Give me some, give me some”

Then track two, Virginia Tech:

“Don’t want to lose
My connection
Trying to trace
My direction
Give it some space
My direction
Do as I do
My direction
Don’t want to lose
My direction”

Message received Noah. I’m on my way. Whatever is in the water there, I need to drink it. Gallons of it.

“Good as I got
Thinkin’ the thoughts
Thinkin’ of you
Out of the blue
Breaking the knot
Marking the spot
My direction

Trying to mend
My depression
Seeing the end
My depression
I’m blurrin’ the sight
My depression
Try as I might
My depression”

Why Now?

We live in an age of overstimulation and algorithmic attention vampirism. Most music screams. Panda Bear hums. In a culture that rewards volume, he offers presence. A sonic permission slip to slow down, shut up, and feel again. His songs are not meant to go viral. They’re meant to be found. Like a secret chord. Like a vinyl left on your doorstep with no note.

Clemency Graves out…