Merriweather Post Pavilion

Dibb sat the record out, so Portner, Lennox and Weitz built it on samplers. Lennox's solo album Person Pitch had shown the way, and Pitchfork's Larry Fitzmaurice noted the buzz around the band's live previews of the new material before release. They tracked in an intense month of February 2008 at Sweet Tea, a studio in an old gas station and woodshop, and mixed in June or July. Allen was chosen for his low-end work with Gnarls Barkley. On the first day, he said, he asked the band to set up all their gear and play him a thirty-minute show. The band set a QSC PA at the back of the control room and used its speakers to make samples and to play back while recording takes. They triggered samples live instead of sequencing them, which left a looseness in the timing that the team chose not to tighten.

The sounds came from Roland SP-404 and SP-555 samplers, SH-2 and Juno 60 synthesizers, a Novation Bass Station for low end, and an Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer that Allen said the band fell in love with. The electronic-sounding drums were acoustic patterns made in the practice space, then treated in the samplers. A lot of the reverb came from a narrow hallway at Sweet Tea. Lennox called it one of the happiest sessions for sure. The cover is an optical illusion of apparent motion, based on the work of the Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka and packaged by Robert Carmichael, with no text or logos on it, even on the spine.

Release and reception

The title and track list went up on the band's site in October 2008. Brother Sport leaked on 18 November through a French podcast, and a vinyl rip leaked on 25 December. The record came out on vinyl in the US on 6 January, ahead of the UK vinyl and CD on 12 January, and peaked at 13 on the Billboard 200 and 2 on the US independent albums chart. Metacritic averaged 89 from 36 reviews. Richardson of Pitchfork found it striking in its immediacy, friendly and welcoming. Andy Battaglia of the AV Club called it a summation and an expansion of everything the band had done. Will Hermes of Rolling Stone singled out Summertime Clothes as a swirling pastoral with dance-music thrust. Pitchfork named it Album of the Year, ranked it 14 on its list of the best albums of the 2000s, and Clash and Spin also named it best of 2009. It appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die in the 2010 and 2013 editions.