"Summertime Clothes" is a song by experimental pop band Animal Collective. It was released on June 29, 2009 in the UK and on July 7, 2009 in the US as the second single from the band's 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion, 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.

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."

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

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Wikipedia