From the primary seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Solely God Was Above Us,” it’s clear that one thing has modified. “Ice Cream Piano” begins with hiss, buzz, suggestions and a hovering, distorted guitar be aware — the other of the clear pop tones which were the band’s hallmark. It’s the start of an album stuffed with startling adjustments and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.
The brand new album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions — generally direct, generally cryptic. However it’s additionally a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 launch, “Father of the Bride,” a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran almost 58 minutes. “Solely God Was Above Us,” the group’s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.
“With each album now we have to push in two instructions without delay,” Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer and first songwriter, mentioned in a current interview. “Generally meaning now we have to be poppier and weirder. Possibly with this file, it’s about each pushing into true maturity, by way of worldview and angle, but in addition pushing again additional into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness together with a few of our most formidable swings ever.”
Koenig, 39, described the brand new album’s sequence of songs as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, possibly to give up. From a form of destructive worldview to one thing a bit deeper.” In the end, he mentioned, the LP is optimistic. “It’s not a doom and gloom file. And even when there’s songs the place the narrator is making an attempt to determine one thing out or feels confused, that’s not all. That’s a part of the story — it’s not the thesis of the album that the world is darkish and horrible.”
The album additionally exults in musical zingers, non sequiturs and startling off-grid eruptions. The songs usually morph by way of a number of adjustments of tempo and texture, riffling unpredictably by way of indie-rock austerity, orchestral lushness, pop perkiness and hallucinatory digital studio concoctions, just like the cascade of wavery, overlapping piano strains in “Join.” The place “Father of the Bride” had a folky openness, “Solely God Was Above Us” is full of concepts that gleefully collide.
Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend’s albums every mirrored patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut, Joe Strummer and Chic for “Contra” from 2010, Leonard Cohen for “Fashionable Vampires of the Metropolis,” and the Grateful Lifeless’s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, together with Phish, for “Father of the Bride.” The brand new album, he mentioned, might replicate a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage In opposition to the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone.
“Distortion, heaviness, hardness,” Koenig mentioned. “We have been drawn towards these qualities on this file in a extra direct approach than ever earlier than.”
Koenig spoke by way of video from his dwelling in Los Angeles. Behind him — from the gathering of his spouse, the actress Rashida Jones — was a wall of pictures by the artist Taryn Simon from the undertaking “Contraband”: bootleg DVD boxed units that have been confiscated by United States Customs, arrayed in Minimalistic formations. Like Vampire Weekend’s songs, they neatly body disruptive materials.
Vampire Weekend has all the time had two distinct points — its fastidious album work and its frisky stay exhibits — and will quickly have three. (Extra on that later.) The central one is the music the band constructs within the studio, which is minutely tweaked and painstakingly thought-about. Vampire Weekend’s songs uphold a long-established custom of concise pop songwriting. However even because it delineates clear verses and choruses, the band pushes each different parameter.
“With some forms of artwork, you most likely need to put quite a lot of thought into learn how to create layers of that means,” Koenig mentioned. “Songs are, by their nature, comparatively brief. They’ve repetitive hooks. Then if you wish to go maximalist and fill it with manufacturing particulars and preparations, you possibly can. And if you’d like the lyrics to push out into some bizarre place, you possibly can.”
But the fundamentals of pop songwriting hold the band’s experimentation grounded. “You may zig and zag from verse one to verse two to verse three, however you retain coming again to the identical refrain,” he added. “However now it’s recontextualized by the second verse. I feel all that stuff is constructed into the format. It’s this nice populist artwork type the place you will get actually on the market however the construction holds it collectively.”
Starting with the 2013 album “Fashionable Vampires of the Metropolis,” Vampire Weekend’s studio output has more and more been a collaboration between Koenig and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has labored on hits with Madonna, Usher, Haim and others.
“I’ve been a part of making issues that sound costly and exquisite,” Rechtshaid mentioned in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. “However on this file, when the songs have been at a sure stage, we have been simply, like, ‘This sounds thrilling to us.’ It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t like, ‘Right here’s the choice to make one thing that feels noisy or soiled or distorted.’ It’s that the songs have been emoting correctly.”
The band and Rechtshaid have been engaged on — and transforming — a lot of the new album’s songs since 2020. Two tracks, “Gen-X Cops” and “The Surfer,” originated a lot earlier. The untamed slide-guitar line of “Gen-X Cops” got here from Brooklyn classes in 2012, whereas “The Surfer” contains much-altered components of a music Koenig had begun writing with Rostam Batmanglij, who left Vampire Weekend in 2016.
“Generally you get fortunate and the music, the manufacturing, the lyrics and the efficiency all come collectively and it suits on the file you’re engaged on,” Koenig mentioned. “And generally, you already know there’s one thing particular about it, however you must put it apart and simply let time do its factor.”
Though Vampire Weekend’s members have settled in Los Angeles, its new album is suffused with ideas of Twentieth-century New York Metropolis. These have been the many years earlier than Vampire Weekend obtained began at Columbia College in 2006. “Bizarre, half-baked recollections and photos and ideas and household historical past,” Koenig mentioned. “That’s the model of New York that’s floating by way of this file.”
The opening tracks ponder battle and disillusionment. “Classical” finds bitter energy struggles hidden in historical past, noting “how the merciless turns into classical in time.” In “Join,” the singer wonders, “Is it unusual I can’t join?,” mingling the non-public and the web. The album ultimately concludes with “Hope,” the longest music in Vampire Weekend’s catalog, a stately, eight-minute litany of disasters and injustices — “The sentencing was overturned/The killer freed, the court docket adjourned” — with a guardedly reassuring chorus: “I hope you let it go.”
The album title comes from a New York Every day Information headline proven in the album’s cover photograph, which was shot by Steven Siegel in 1988 at a subway graveyard, inside a subway automobile turned sideways — a picture that appears surreal however wanted no particular results. One music, “Mary Boone,” borrows the title of the SoHo gallery owner who was vastly influential within the Nineteen Eighties.
One other, “Prep-Faculty Gangsters,” is known as after a 1996 story in New York magazine about privileged college students dabbling within the drug commerce. “The prep-school gangster — these are the individuals who run the overwhelming majority of establishments,” Koenig mentioned. “It’s very attainable, particularly in America, particularly in New York, that now and again the prep-school gangster’s grandfather was as soon as the deprived youth, and that the deprived youth’s grandson would be the prep-school gangster. And right here they’re on this transient second of time, assembly collectively.”
“The Surfer” begins with a reference to “Water Tunnel 3,” a undertaking to deliver water to New York Metropolis from a reservoir in Yonkers. It has been underneath building since 1970 and is way from full.
“There’s that eerie however stunning feeling that beneath this, essentially the most populous metropolis in America, there’s an nearly century-long undertaking taking place, the place individuals are burrowing by way of the Earth,” Koenig mentioned. “After which, basic New York stuff that everyone needs to speak about, the bagels and the pizza — it’s so good due to the water. The place does the water come from? It comes from upstate New York, far-off. How does it get into any person’s faucet on the Decrease East Facet?
“It’s all the time been a slight obsession of mine,” he continued. “I like that concept concerning the underground. I don’t imply culturally. I imply simply actually what’s underground.”
Vampire Weekend will quickly be resurfacing to tour — a job far faraway from the band’s finely detailed studio work. Actual-time performing was once a fraught prospect for such a perfectionist group. “I might hear different musicians discuss, ‘Oh man, you already know, touring is hard, however then when you get onstage, all of your worries go away and also you’re simply connecting with the viewers,’” Koenig recalled. “And I’d assume, ‘What are these folks speaking about? That’s when the concerns begin.’”
For its 2019 tour, Vampire Weekend expanded its stage lineup to seven musicians and vocalists, opening up extra potentialities within the songs and relieving a number of the virtuosic pressures. “Now, once we get collectively to rehearse, there’s a youthful, playful vibe,” Koenig mentioned. “We’re all the time developing with concepts that make us giggle.” The complete band has been practising since November for a summer season tour it’ll preview on April 8 — performing a noon live performance in Austin within the path of the total photo voltaic eclipse and sharing a free livestream.
Together with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend might quickly unveil a 3rd aspect. Chris Baio, the band’s bassist, and Chris Tomson, its drummer, did separate video interviews from the studio area they share in Los Angeles — a transformed medical workplace the place Vampire Weekend began assembly in summer season 2020 for weekly, Covid-distanced jam classes, enjoying in separate rooms and recording a whole lot of hours of music.
“The world had stopped working and quite a lot of what we usually do was simply not being carried out,” Tomson recalled. “There was one thing about simply enjoying with no expectation — to simply play with my two very shut mates with out an agenda.”
Baio mentioned, “It’s very uncommon for folks in a band of our dimension to be alone collectively. No engineer, no tour supervisor, nothing like that. It felt like being on the outset of the band once more. And we did that for 3 years and alter, at any time when we have been all on the town.”
These classes might result in the emergence of a brand new trio that occurs to have the identical members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased materials.
“We form of have an imaginary again story for that band,” Koenig added. “It was a band that got here out round 1989, 1990, they usually have been a bit bit too punky for the jam scene and a bit bit too jammy for the punk scene. And there’s a bit little bit of the Minutemen in there. The reality is, that is very untimely as a result of that band remains to be hashing out its sound. I don’t need to say an excessive amount of.”
May the unnamed trio open exhibits on Vampire Weekend’s tour? “That has been mentioned,” Koenig mentioned dryly.
“We’re simply making an attempt to create a sound that we’ve by no means fairly heard earlier than,” he had famous earlier. “That’s what retains us going.”
