Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	89/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A
Entertainment Weekly	A−
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
NME	8/10
Pitchfork	9.6/10
Q
Rolling Stone
Spin

Merriweather Post Pavilion is the eighth studio album by American experimental pop group Animal Collective, released in January 2009 on Domino Records. It peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the US Top Independent Albums charts. According to review aggregate site Metacritic, Merriweather was the most critically acclaimed album of 2009, and went on to sell a total of 200,000 copies. It spawned the singles "My Girls", "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport", the former of which was named the Best Song of 2009 by Pitchfork and Slant Magazine.

The album is named after the Columbia, Maryland venue, Merriweather Post Pavilion. A plan to perform at Merriweather Post Pavilion after the album's release in 2009 was ultimately discarded, though the band eventually did perform there on July 9, 2011.

After recording Strawberry Jam in January 2007, guitarist Deakin (Josh Dibb) decided he would take time off from the group for undisclosed personal reasons. As a result, the group went about writing a new batch of songs to be played without guitar. Drawing inspiration from Panda Bear's Person Pitch, the band used samplers as its primary instruments. The group debuted nine of these songs, most of which would later appear on the album, in May 2007 and toured with them through 2008.

To record their eighth studio album, Animal Collective sought the services of Ben H. Allen as co-producer. In an interview with the Baltimore City Paper, Allen stated that the band chose him due to "my work with Gnarls Barkley, and wanted my low-end expertise". According to band-member Brian Weitz, while "[t]hat was the original attraction", Animal Collective was also impressed by his eclectic music tastes, "[h]e seemed to be somebody that technically knew how to work in [urban hip-hop], but was open-minded to other styles as well. . . . knowing that he’d been involved in a lot of the Bad Boy Records stuff from the '90s was exciting to us". Subsequently, the band and Allen met over a few conference calls on Skype in January 2008, and began recording on February 1 at Sweet Tea Recording Studio in Oxford, Mississippi.

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