A chillwave pioneer who soon left that tag behind, Toro y Moi's Chaz Bundick heads in unpredictable directions with every record and project. Whether digging into '80s R&B, house music (on the Les Sins side project in 2014), space age pop, prog, or guitar-heavy power pop (as on 2015's What For?), Bear is never satisfied to stick to one formula when he could experiment instead. Whether tapping into the mainstream zeitgeist, as on 2017's modern R&B-inspired Boo Boo, veering off into the funky psychedelic realms of 2022's Mahal, taking a country-rock side trip on 2023's Sandhills EP, or delving into hazy cloud rap with 2024's Hole Erth, Bundick's innate melodic gifts and sonic shape-shifting prove impervious to genre shifts and sonic zigzags. Chaz Bundick started making bedroom recordings under the name Toro y Moi in his native Columbia, South Carolina, in 2001. Growing up, he'd heard the disparate sounds of funk, soul, and new wave around the house and these influences colored his musical experiments. As he continued recording, the work of more contemporary artists like Beach House, Dilla, and Animal Collective proved influential as well. Along with recording many albums on his own, Bundick also played in bands. The Toro y Moi recordings were the ones that caught the ear of Carpark Records, however, and it released the "Blessa"/"109" single in 2009. The dreamlike, lo-fi songs were proto-typical chillwave, and Toro y Moi, along with Neon Indian and Washed Out -- whose Ernest Greene was a childhood friend of Bundick's -- were seen as the vanguard artists of the nascent style. The first Toro y Moi album on Carpark, the murky, home-cooked Causers of This, was released in 2010 and got a lot of coverage in the press and some high-profile fans like Kanye West. After making an album that relied on samples alone, Bundick swung in the other direction for 2011's Underneath the Pine, using real instruments and incorporating space age bachelor pad and disco influences into his sound. The end result wasn't very chillwave by design, and it showed that Bundick had more to offer than murky, bedroom dream pop. That same year, he released the Freaking Out EP, which moved even closer to the dancefloor and featured a shimmering cover of Alexander O'Neal & Cherrelle's 1985 R&B hit "Saturday Love." After Bundick moved to Berkeley, California in 2012, his music began to reflect his separation from loved ones, giving his next album a slightly more melancholy feel. Anything in Return was released in early 2013 on Carpark. His next move was to give himself over to dance music entirely, releasing the Michael album in 2014 under the name Les Sins. It was the first release on Bundick's new label, Company, which he co-ran with Carpark. The same year, he also collaborated with Vinyl Williams on an album of new age prog songs titled Trance Zen Dental Spa. The next Toro y Moi album, 2015's What For?, featured contributions from guitarist Julian Lynch and Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson, and was the project's most straightforward collection of guitar-heavy pop songs to date. Bundick took an expanded live band out on the road, filming/recording one of the concerts, then releasing it as Live from Trona in 2016. He also hooked up with the jazz-prog duo the Mattson 2 to record the Star Stuff album, which Company issued in late 2016. By the time that album hit the shelves, Bundick had begun recording another Toro y Moi album. It was a time of soul-searching on both personal and musical levels, leading him to change his name to Chaz Bear and shift musical gears back to his trademark ambient R&B chillwave sound. Taking inspiration from artists like Frank Ocean and Oneohtrix Point Never, Boo Boo introduced more chill and space into the mix. It featured Bear playing most of the instruments, apart from contributions from live keyboardist Anthony Ferraro and vocalist Madeline Kenney, and was issued by Carpark in July 2017. After releasing Toro y Rome, Vol. 1, a five-song EP made with Philadelphia rapper Rome Fortune in 2018, Bear issued the sixth full-length Toro y Moi album, Outer Peace, early in 2019. The record showed the influence of Daft Punk and the Caribbean funk of keyboardist Wally Badarou while also dipping into modern pop sounds. Soon after, Bear released a corollary to the album with the chillwave-leaning Soul Trash mixtape. Rounding out a busy year, he worked with Flume on the song "The Difference." which ended up being nominated for a Grammy in 2020 in the Best Dance Recording category. Bear's next move was to the ambient sounds he had first begun investigating under the name PLUM in 2016. He issued the Street View album, which was paired with an interactive website, in late 2020. By that time, California was under strict lockdown protocol and Bear spent time finishing an album he had begun work on five years earlier. Envisioned as a gritty, deeply funky take on psychedelia, it included contributions from Neon Indian's Alan Palomo, Ruban Nielson (of UMO), the Mattson 2, Salami Rose Joe Louis, vocalist Sofie, and members of his live band. While finishing the music up in his Oakland studio, Bear wrote the words quickly, and not surprisingly many of them revolved around isolation and his relationship to media and communication. The finished product, 2022's Mahal, was his first record for Dead Oceans. He continued to work behind the scenes, producing and playing on Tanukichan's 2023 album Gizmo and that same year, he issued the Sandhills EP, a country-rock-inspired release that revolved around memories of his South Carolina upbringing. Never one to stay in one lane for too long, Bundick swerved into a mashup of auto-Tuned cloud rap and atmospheric electronic dreamgaze that called to mind both his productions for rappers and his own early chillwave days. Toro y Moi's late 2024 album, Hole Erth -- whose title and ethos were inspired by the counterculture guide Whole Earth -- sounded unlike anything he had done previously and featured a suitably wide range of guests like Death Cab for Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard, rapper/vocalist Don Toliver, hyperpop artist Glaive, and Kevin Abstract of Brockhampton. - Biography by Tim Sendra Already highly influential as a member of Animal Collective, Panda Bear has altered the course of indie rock even further with his work as a solo artist. His reverb-saturated vocal harmonies take notes from the Beach Boys, while his sample-based songwriting brings in techniques borrowed from hip-hop producers such as Madlib and Pete Rock, as well as atmospheric techno labels like Kompakt and Dial. His 2007 full-length Person Pitch helped reframe the use of samples in indie rock, and Panda Bear's synthesis of electronic production, emotionally vulnerable lyricism, and psychedelic spirit evolved on subsequent albums like 2019's Buoys and his 2022 collaboration with Sonic Boom, Reset. Noah Lennox adopted the name Panda Bear in the late '90s, when he drew a picture of a panda on one of his first bedroom studio recordings. He grew up in Maryland and Pennsylvania, went to college at Boston University, and eventually found his way to New York City, where he met his future Animal Collective bandmates Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin. In addition to his work with Animal Collective, Jane, and Together, Lennox has released several solo albums. In 1999, while Lennox and Avey Tare were still in the earliest stages of what would grow to be known as Animal Collective, the first solo collection of Panda Bear material arrived on an obscure self-titled release on indie label Soccer Star. The electronica-pop recordings were miles away from the more spectral folk weirdness Lennox would explore over the next several years. Materializing in 2004, his more widely distributed second solo album, Young Prayer, was a murky, largely wordless free-folk album influenced by the death of his father. That year, Lennox moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he met fashion designer Fernanda Pereira while on vacation; the two subsequently married and started a family. Person Pitch, Lennox's third album and second on the Paw Tracks label, followed three years later. The album was a patchwork of repurposed samples and densely layered vocals, and not only met enormous popularity and critical acclaim, but went on to be incredibly influential on the entire indie spectrum. Lennox guested on recordings by Atlas Sound, Pantha du Prince, Taken by Trees, and Ducktails, and remixed the Notwist's song "Boneless." For his next solo album, Lennox made the decision to move away from samplers toward a more guitar-heavy sound. Working with producer Sonic Boom, Lennox released his fourth solo album, Tomboy, on Paw Tracks in 2011. He continued racking up guest appearances, collaborating with Zomby, Teengirl Fantasy, and Daft Punk, whose 2013 album Random Access Memories (containing the Panda Bear-featuring "Doin' It Right") won the 2014 Grammy for Album of the Year. In October of 2014, Panda Bear released a new EP, Mr. Noah. The EP's title track also appeared on Lennox's fifth full-length, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, which arrived on Domino in early 2015. The colorful album again found Lennox collaborating with producer Sonic Boom. The full-length was followed by PBVSGR Remixes, an EP containing reworks by Pete Rock, Andy Stott, Container, and others, as well as Crosswords, another EP containing updated and unreleased material. In early 2018, Panda Bear released a vinyl-only EP titled A Day with the Homies. For sixth full length album Buoys, Lennox reunited with producer Rusty Santos, who he'd last collaborated with on 2007's Person Pitch. The duo worked on material for the new album with the goal of making music that would connect with the tastes of a younger audience. To do this they intentionally tried to replicate and adapt production techniques of the era's popular music. The nine-song album was released in early February 2019. In 2022, Lennox and longtime collaborator Sonic Boom released Reset, their first official joint album after years of working together on each other's projects. Begun during the international lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Reset found these old friends pushing each other to new places, with Sonic Boom singing on some tracks where he'd stuck to mostly instrumental input on the pair's previous collaborations. Reset was released in August of 2022 on Domino Records. - Biography by Paul Simpson