Photos by Atiba Jefferson

When I last spoke with Dave Portner, aka Avey Tare, he had just relocated from his longtime New York City home to live in Los Angeles before the release of Animal Collective's 2012 album Centipede Hz. "I'll see how this goes," Portner told me then regarding the move; two years later, he's settled in nicely. He now speaks excitedly about having time to garden and cook at his Echo Park home, enthusiastically rattling off a list of his favorite hiking spots. When it comes to L.A.'s taxi cab infrastructure, though, he's not as chuffed. "The taxi situation here is very scary and dangerous," he says with a nervous laugh. "I never feel safe." (And no, he doesn't use Uber.)

Since Animal Collective's extensive touring schedule in support of Centipede Hz came to a close, Portner's been up to more than just hiking and perilous cab rides: He's formed a new band, Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, with ex-Dirty Projectors member Angel Deradoorian and former Ponytail drummer Jeremy Hyman. The group went on a brief tour last year, and now they're ready with their debut LP, Enter the Slasher House, out in April via Domino. The self-produced album was recorded by the band last year, fashioned out of guitar-based demos Portner had previously laid down to tape; although Deradoorian and Hyman's own musical signatures pop up here and there, the winding, squishy song structures and melodic phrasing are unmistakably Portner's.

"Any time you put too many restrictions on what you're doing, you stop experimenting," Portner says about his artistic aims with the new group. "It's easier to make abstract stuff with Animal Collective because there's so many different minds working on one thing. With Slasher Flicks, I wanted to delve more into the idea of one mic in a room capturing this live energy. We tried to do that with the last Animal Collective record, but it didn't turn out that way." Portner's recent love for 1960s garage rock shines through in Enter the Slasher House's first single, "Little Fang", a swaggering gem that's one of the most straightforward songs Portner's put to tape outside of his work with Animal Collective.

Elsewhere, the record is more complex and strident—although Portner doesn't necessarily see it that way. "Animal Collective's sound guy works with Slasher Flicks too, and on the last tour he said, 'It'll take me a couple shows to figure out what's happening here.' I was like, 'Really? It sounds so simple and minimal to me.' He was like, 'You guys always think everything is so simple and minimal, but it just sounds crazy.'"

Emotionally, Enter the Slasher House is a sharp left turn from his last solo effort, 2010's murky Down There, which was written while Portner was dealing with weighty personal issues, including a divorce from former múm member Kría Brekkan and his sister surviving cancer of the tear ducts. "I was sick a lot last year, so writing these songs had a lot to do with me trying to have some positive vibrations and getting away from feeling dark," he says. "I didn't want to dwell on that anymore. I wanted to find the medicine through music."

Along with a Slasher Flicks tour this spring, Portner is aiming to rejoin with Animal Collective and put out a new record "some time next year," and is thinking about a proper solo follow-up to Down There consisting of unreleased material that he tested out on the road while touring behind that album. But, true to his new project's name, he's still making time for his beloved horror movies, including recent highlights Insidious and The Conjuring. "I've always liked the campier, more fun side of horror, like those cheesy haunted house rides at fairs where there's sloppy effects and rubber figures jumping out at you. It's clearly meant for kids, but there's something endearing and cool about it."

Pitchfork: Apart from 1960s garage rock, are there any other types of music you had in mind when writing this Slasher Flicks album?

Dave Portner: The idea of the novelty pop song—like "Monster Mash" or "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!"—doesn't really pop up a lot anymore in music, but those songs have a fun, weird, pop-horror element to them. I wanted to make modern takes on that type of song. 

Pitchfork: What's the difference between working with Animal Collective and working as a part of this new band?

DP: Animal Collective have a communal way of working together that we've all grown to understand. It's a comfort zone, so playing music with other musicians is immediately stepping out of that comfort zone. You have to be open. Animal Collective put a lot of time into recording—we spend very long days in the studio, which has to do with the fact that we're not really around each other a lot, so when are we really work. I don't think Angel and Jeremy come from that side of things.

I love it in the studio—I could spend ten hours mixing, easy. Other people are always like, "Man, we have to take a break." I'm always like, "Really?" Jeremy, Angel, and I found a meeting ground in between those two mindsets, which feels really good. It's been good for me to have some time off lately, too, because it's hard to keep sinking yourself into one record after another. That's not really what I want to be doing with my life right now.

Enter the Slasher House cover:

Pitchfork: Animal Collective's early performances were more impressionistic, but on the Centipede Hz tour, the approach felt more professional.

DP: Right before Centipede Hz came out, we made a conscious decision to put more old songs into our set. We have such a wide catalog that we can play around with at this point, and it's music that people like to hear. That decision has to do with how many people come to see us now, and what they are coming to see. In the past, I didn't think about being an entertainer so much. It was maybe a little bit more selfish of an approach, but I don't feel bad about it.

In the beginning, it was about what we could do to catch people's attention and draw them in. We wanted to cause a reaction and make people feel like they were seeing something new. We built up a community of people that understand Animal Collective. We're these close friends getting up on stage performing this really private ritual that people either can or cannot relate to, but it was our thing and it truly felt like it was coming from us. Now, we play for almost two hours every night, so playing the way we used to is just not possible. But it's still fun for us. Some of the shows we've played over the past year are our all-time favorites. We record all of them, so to listen back be like, "Man, we really nailed that," is nice. Before, it was more about the energy that went into the songs, but now it's more about how we wrote "My Girls", and that's a great song, and now we can home in on it and make it awesome live.