Monkey Riches

"Monkey Riches" opens Centipede Hz like a carnival barker shouting over a malfunctioning sound system — it's loud, colorful, and deliberately disorienting, a full-spectrum assault of synths, layered percussion, and competing vocal lines that seem to be having their own separate conversations simultaneously. The production philosophy here is accumulation: each element added not to clarify but to thicken, until the track achieves a kind of critical mass of sensation. Avey Tare's vocals spiral through the mix with frantic energy, and there's a sense of barely-controlled joy in the performance, like something overflowing its container. The emotional register is exhilarated and slightly unhinged — music that sounds like the inside of a very good, very strange dream, where everything is vivid and nothing stays still long enough to examine. Lyrically it leans into the surreal and the celebratory, language used more for its sonic texture than its precise meaning. It sits within Animal Collective's ongoing project of making psychedelia feel physical rather than ethereal. This is for the opening of a night out, windows down, moving fast — or for moments when you want your brain to be genuinely occupied by something that resists passive listening.