Summertime Clothes

"Summertime Clothes"
Song

"Summertime Clothes" is the second single from Animal Collective's 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion, released on June 29, 2009 in the UK and on July 7, 2009 in the US by Domino Records. The song was originally known as "Bearhug."

The single features three new remixes of the song by Dâm-Funk, Leon Day, and Zomby, and is available as a 12" vinyl single and as a digital download.

Background

The original name of the song was "Bearhug" and featured different lyrics and higher pitched-vocals. In a 2009 interview with French magazine VoxPop, David Portner said, "The melody of this song came suddenly, while we were rehearsing at my house. It’s so simple and we immediately loved it. I tried to find an additional melody, much more dark and weird, but nobody liked it! In general, I write the most ‘complex’ songs in Animal Collective, with structures A / B / C / D / E… but I wanted to keep the almost naive simplicity of this song."

Merriweather Post Pavilion featured more vocals than most of Animal Collective's other albums, and as a result the band had trouble finding ground with their producer and amongst themselves about how the vocals were to be mixed. "Summertime Clothes" was where most of the band had trouble agreeing with one another about the mix.

Brian Weitz stated in an interview with Sound to Sound, "Pretty early on in the mixing we realised we were gonna have to find the middle ground, so we would do three mixes, where the vocals would be where we wanted them to be, then one louder where Ben wanted them to be and then one even lower than where we wanted them to be, just in case we changed our mind. It was very, very rare that we went with the loud vocal version. ‘Summertime Clothes’ is the biggest example of where we disagreed. Even after we finished the record we were still thinking maybe the vocals are too loud on that song. And Ben felt the opposite way."

Music video

A screenshot from the music video showing one of the clothed figures dancing next to one of the women in giant bubbles.

A music video was released for the song on June 12, 2009, directed by Danny Perez, who also worked on the "Who Could Win a Rabbit" video and the band's film ODDSAC.

The video shows a group of women in large bubbles and giant red legs and figures wearing mismatched colored clothing dancing erratically, with flashing colored lights illuminating them. They all dance around an ice sculpture of a young boy and girl, which is slowly melting due to a rising flame.

The video prominently features the Brooklyn-based FLEX dance crew.

In popular culture

• "Summertime Clothes" is featured in the soundtrack to the video game Skate 3.

Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Summertime Clothes" (Album Version)	4:33
2.	"Summertime Clothes" (Dâm-Funk Remix)	5:38
3.	"Summertime Clothes" (Leon Day AKA L.D. Remix)	6:20
4.	"Summertime Clothes" (Zomby's Analog Lego Mix)	3:49