Grizzly Bear Shields: 2025 Reissue

Grizzly Bear's 2012 Studio Album Shields on Colored 2LP.

Color Of Vinyl Subject To Change Without Notice / Call To Confirm Colored Copies Are Still Available

Shields, the fourth album by Grizzly Bear, was released on Sept. 18, 2012. The quartet of Chris Bear, Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor have never made a quick follow-up; it took them three years to get from Horn of Plenty to Yellow House, three more to get from Yellow House to Veckatimest. Between those records, though, they'd not only toured (headlining as well as with the likes of Radiohead, Feist, Wilco, TV on the Radio and more), but issued singles and splits, EPs, remixes and solo projects. The potential energy gathered in tour vans and busses, in studios and on stages for years was finally released, giving the individual band's pieces the chance to recover and, after a year, return to being Grizzly Bear, and delivering their best album yet. "This has a different energy behind it," concludes Ed Droste. "Veckatimest was a little more of a polite album; the desire to keep the vocals smooth might have kept a little distance between us and the audience. This one feels a bit more rough and exposed, so that on Shields, everything speaks for itself."

Grizzly Bear never broke up. In the six years that have passed since their most recent shows, the four members who first drifted into the group two decades ago as loose friends and even total strangers—Chris Bear, Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, Chris Taylor—have drifted out into other things. They’ve made other music, pursued other careers, cultivated other families, lived other lives beyond the bounds of being this band. And now, for the first time since 2019, these four musicians and friends will drift back into Grizzly Bear, to test the ties that made them one of this century’s most engrossing and beloved acts and see where else those old connections may yet lead. Because Grizzly Bear never broke up, their first shows in six years are not a reunion; they are a simultaneous point of arrival and departure, their next destination still unknown.

That sort of open-ended approach, after all, is what still makes Grizzly Bear one of this young century’s defining acts. Twenty years ago, they quickly morphed from a lo-fi songwriter project to a full band with an instantly singular sound, uncanny harmonies slipping around arrangements that paired the glow of a chamber orchestra to the grit of a rock group. They helped to redefine what was possible within indie rock by balancing lushness with looseness, a technical excellence with an emotional openness. Their musical traces remain ubiquitous, bits of their unorthodox perspective on sound and texture now part of the firmament. Hearing these songs live in 2025 will feel less like shaking hands with the past, then, than seeing their fingerprints in the present, as if for the first time.

These live shows will be accompanied by color vinyl album reissues of Yellow House, Veckatimest, Shields and Painted Ruins.